Spin Drag and Spin-Charge Separation in Cold Fermi Gases

Low-energy spin and charge excitations of one-dimensional interacting fermions are completely decoupled and propagate with different velocities. These modes however can decay due to several possible mechanisms. In this paper we expose a new facet of spin-charge separation: not only the speeds but also the damping rates of spin and charge excitations are different. While the propagation of long-wavelength charge excitations is essentially ballistic, spin propagation is intrinsically damped and diffusive. We suggest that cold Fermi gases trapped inside a tight atomic waveguide offer the opportunity to measure the spin-drag relaxation rate that controls the broadening of a spin packet.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitte

Theory of the plasma-wave photoresponse of a gated graphene sheet

The photoresponse of graphene has recently received considerable attention. The main mechanisms yielding a finite dc response to an oscillating radiation field which have been investigated include responses of photovoltaic, photo-thermoelectric, and bolometric origin. In this Article we present a fully analytical theory of a photoresponse mechanism which is based on the excitation of plasma waves in a gated graphene sheet. By employing the theory of relativistic hydrodynamics, we demonstrate that plasma-wave photodetection is substantially influenced by the massless Dirac fermion character of carriers in graphene and that the efficiency of photodetection can be improved with respect to that of ordinary parabolic-band electron fluids in semiconductor heterostructures.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 appendi

Dielectric function and plasmons of doped three-dimensional Luttinger semimetals

Luttinger semimetals are three-dimensional electron systems with a parabolic band touching and an effective total spin $J=3/2$. In this paper, we present an analytical theory of dielectric screening of inversion-symmetric Luttinger semimetals with an arbitrary carrier density and conduction-valence effective mass asymmetry. Assuming a spherical approximation for the single-particle Luttinger Hamiltonian, we determine analytically the dielectric screening function in the random phase approximation for arbitrary values of the wave vector and frequency, the latter in the complex plane. We use this analytical expression to calculate the dispersion relation and Landau damping of the collective modes in the charge sector (i.e., plasmons).Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, published versio

Topological pumping in class-D superconducting wires

We study adiabatic pumping at a normal metal/class-D superconductor hybrid interface when superconductivity is induced through the proximity effect in a spin-orbit coupled nanowire in the presence of a tilted Zeeman field. When the induced order parameter in the nanowire is non-uniform, the phase diagram has isolated trivial regions surrounded by topological ones. We show that in this case the pumped charge is quantized in units of the elementary charge $e$ and has a topological nature.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Published versio

Electronic structure and magnetic properties of few-layer Cr2_2Ge2_2Te6_6: the key role of nonlocal electron-electron interaction effects

Atomically-thin magnetic crystals have been recently isolated experimentally, greatly expanding the family of two-dimensional materials. In this Article we present an extensive comparative analysis of the electronic and magnetic properties of ${\rm Cr}_2{\rm Ge}_2{\rm Te}_6$, based on density functional theory (DFT). We first show that the often-used ${\rm DFT}+U$ approaches fail in predicting the ground-state properties of this material in both its monolayer and bilayer forms, and even more spectacularly in its bulk form. In the latter case, the fundamental gap {\it decreases} by increasing the Hubbard-$U$ parameter, eventually leading to a metallic ground state for physically relevant values of $U$, in stark contrast with experimental data. On the contrary, the use of hybrid functionals, which naturally take into account nonlocal exchange interactions between all orbitals, yields good account of the available ARPES experimental data. We then calculate all the relevant exchange couplings (and the magneto-crystalline anisotropy energy) for monolayer, bilayer, and bulk ${\rm Cr}_2{\rm Ge}_2{\rm Te}_6$ with a hybrid functional, with super-cells containing up to $270$ atoms, commenting on existing calculations with much smaller super-cell sizes. In the case of bilayer ${\rm Cr}_2{\rm Ge}_2{\rm Te}_6$, we show that two distinct intra-layer second-neighbor exchange couplings emerge, a result which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been noticed in the literature.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Nonlocal superconducting correlations in graphene in the quantum Hall regime

We study Andreev processes and nonlocal transport in a three-terminal graphene-superconductor hybrid system under a quantizing perpendicular magnetic field [G.-H. Lee et al., Nature Phys. 13, 693 (2017)]. We find that the amplitude of the crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) processes crucially depends on the orientation of the lattice. By employing Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker scattering theory, we find that CAR is generally very small for a zigzag edge, while for an armchair edge it can be larger than the normal transmission, thereby resulting in a negative nonlocal resistance. In the case of an armchair edge and with a wide superconducting region (as compared to the superconducting coherence length), CAR exhibits large oscillations as a function of the magnetic field due to interference effects. This results in sign changes of the nonlocal resistance