Spin-Hall conductivity and Hall angle in a two-dimensional system with impurities in the presence of spin-orbit interactions.

We investigate the spin-torque-dependent Spin Hall phenomenon in a two-dimensional tight-binding system in the presence of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions and random static impurities. We employ the Matsubara Green function techniques to calculate the relaxation time caused by the scattering of electrons by impurities. The longitudinal and transverse conductivities are next calculated with the help of the Kubo formalism. We have also calculated the spin Hall angle for the present model and studied its dependence on spin-orbit interactions and impurity strength. Finally, we explore the effect of interplay between the Rashba and Dresselhaus interactions on the spin-Hall effect.

Engineering topological phase transition and Aharonov-Bohm caging in a flux-staggered lattice.

A tight binding network of diamond shaped unit cells trapping a staggered magnetic flux distribution is shown to exhibit a topological phase transition under a controlled variation of the flux trapped in a cell. A simple real space decimation technique maps a binary flux staggered network into an equivalent Su-Shrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model. In this way, dealing with a subspace of the full degrees of freedom, we show that a topological phase transition can be initiated by tuning the applied magnetic field that eventually simulates an engineering of the numerical values of the overlap integrals in the paradigmatic SSH model. Thus one can use an external agent, rather than monitoring the intrinsic property of a lattice to control the topological properties. This is advantageous from an experimental point of view. We also provide an in-depth description and analysis of the topologically protected edge states, and discuss how, by tuning the flux from outside one can enhance the spatial extent of the Aharonov-Bohm caging of single particle states for any arbitrary period of staggering. This feature can be useful for the study of transport of quantum information. Our results are exact.

Engineering magnetoresistance: a new perspective.

A new proposal is given to achieve high degree of magnetoresistance (MR) in a magnetic quantum device where two magnetic layers are separated by a non-magnetic (NM) quasiperiodic layer that acts as a spacer. The NM spacer is chosen in the form of well-known Aubry-André or Harper (AAH) model which essentially gives the non-trivial features in MR due to its gaped spectrum and yields the opportunities of controlling MR selectively by tuning the AAH phase externally. We also explore the role of dephasing on magnetotransport to make the model more realistic. Finally, we illustrate the experimental possibilities of our proposed quantum system.

Persistent current in a correlated quantum ring with electron-phonon interaction in the presence of Rashba interaction and Aharonov-Bohm flux.

Persistent current in a correlated quantum ring threaded by an Aharonov-Bohm flux is studied in the presence of electron-phonon interactions and Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The quantum ring is modeled by the Holstein-Hubbard-Rashba Hamiltonian and the energy is calculated by performing the conventional Lang-Firsov transformation followed by the diagonalization of the effective Hamiltonian within a mean-field approximation. The effects of Aharonov-Bohm flux, temperature, spin-orbit and electron-phonon interactions on the persistent current are investigated. It is shown that the electron-phonon interactions reduce the persistent current, while the Rashba coupling enhances it. It is also shown that temperature smoothens the persistent current curve. The effect of chemical potential on the persistent current is also studied.

Metal-insulator transition in an aperiodic ladder network: an exact result.

We prove that a tight-binding ladder network composed of atomic sites with on-site potentials distributed according to the quasiperiodic Aubry model can exhibit a metal-insulator transition at multiple values of the Fermi energy. For specific values of the first and second neighbor electron hopping, the result is obtained exactly. With a more general model, we numerically calculate the two-terminal conductance. The numerical results corroborate the analytical findings.

Effect of Fibonacci modulation on superconductivity.

We have studied finite-sized single band models with short-range pairing interactions between electrons in the presence of diagonal Fibonacci modulation in one dimension. Two models, namely the attractive Hubbard model and the Penson-Kolb model, have been investigated at half-filling at zero temperature by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations in real space within a mean-field approximation. The competition between 'disorder' and the pairing interaction leads to a suppression of superconductivity (of usual pairs with zero centre-of-mass momenta) in the strong-coupling limit while an enhancement of the pairing correlation is observed in the weak-coupling regime for both models. However, the dissimilarity of the pairing mechanisms in these two models brings about notable differences in the results. The extent to which the bond-ordered wave and the η-paired (of pairs with centre-of-mass momenta = π) phases of the Penson-Kolb model are affected by the disorder has also been studied in the present calculation. Some finite size effects are also identified.