Persistent current of correlated, spin carrying electrons

Wolfgang Häusler

Andrei A. Zvyagin

Roman Krčmár, Andrej Gendiar, Martin Moško +3 more

Z. A. Németh, J.-L. Pichard

Jörn Barth, Alexander Altland

We introduce a model for the persistent current carried by spinless fermions moving in a ring with a high-dimensional cross section. The effects of both disorder and electron - electron interaction are considered. It is found that the non-interacting system behaves like previously considered low-dimensional models. The more complicated interacting/disordered case is analysed by means of a functional integral which is evaluated in the limit of infinite dimensionality by expanding in the number of transverse channels. To leading order in this expansion scheme, the Coulomb interaction does not affect the persistent current. It is found that the insensitivity to interaction effects is due to the absence of local contributions to the Coulomb vertex in our model (which in turn is a consequence of the neglect of the electron spin). It is argued that the physical mechanism suppressing the interaction in the high-dimensional spinless model applies to the analogous low-dimensional case as well.

Ju Gao, Fang Shen

We show that a propagating Dirac electron with intrinsic spin generically carries a real--space helical conserved current, even in the absence of orbital angular momentum. Using exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement, we demonstrate that this helical structure possesses definite handedness, persists into evanescent regions, and is characterized by a geometric helix pitch independent of the longitudinal de~Broglie wavelength. This intrinsic helical geometry enables a local geometric coupling between a propagating electron and a chiral environment, yielding chirality--dependent spin selectivity through current geometry rather than through a spin--orbit coupling term.