MajuLab Seminar by Keith Slevin – 14 December 2023

I have a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and a PhD from Imperial College in Solid State Physics.
Since 1997 I have been an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Science at Osaka University in Japan.
My interests include Anderson localisation, the quantum Hall effect, the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors, the Kondo effect, machine learning, the localisation landscape…

Seminar

SPOQC: Time evolution of coherent wave propagation and spin relaxation in spin-orbit coupled systems

I will talk about recent work with Masataka Kakoi in which we investigate the time evolution of a particle in an initial plane wave state as it is subject to elastic scattering in a two-dimensional disordered system with spin-orbit coupling (SOC). We have studied the time dependence of the disorder-averaged momentum distribution both numerically and analytically. In the analytic calculation, the SOC is treated non-perturbatively, and the disorder perturbatively. We identify weak and strong SOC regimes and the relevant time and energy scales in each case. We calculate the time dependence of coherent backscattering as a function of the strength of the SOC. By studying the time dependence of the anisotropy of the momentum distribution we identify the spin relaxation time. We find a crossover from
D’yakonov-Perel’ spin relaxation for weak SOC to Elliot-Yafet like behaviour for strong SOC.

Further details of our work can be found in our preprint
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.04613

MajuLab is an international joint research unit of the CNRS, UCA, SU, NUS and NTU in Singapore (IRL 3654), hosted by CQT and SPMS.