Spin-orbit interaction enabled electronic Raman scattering from charge collective modes

Abstract

Electronic Raman scattering in the fully symmetric channel couples to the charge excitations in the system, including the plasmons. However, the plasmon response has a spectral weight of $\sim q^2$, where $q$, the momentum transferred by light, is small. In this work, we show that in inversion symmetry broken systems where Rashba type spin-orbit coupling affects the states at the Fermi energy (which is a known low energy effect) as well as the transition elements to other states (a high energy effect), there is an additional coupling of the plasmons to the Raman vertex, even at zero momentum transfer, that results in a spectral weight that is proportional to the spin-orbit coupling. The high energy effect is due to the breaking of SU(2) spin invariance in the spin-flip transitions to the intermediate state. We present a theory for this coupling near the resonant regime of Raman scattering and show that in giant Rashba systems it can dominate over the conventional $q^2$ weighted coupling. We also provide experimental support along with a symmetry based justification for this spin-mediated coupling by identifying a prominent c-axis plasmon peak in the fully symmetric channel of the resonant Raman spectrum of the giant Rashba material BiTeI. This new coupling could lead to novel ways of manipulating coherent charge excitations in inversion-broken systems. This process is also relevant for spectroscopic studies in ultrafast spectroscopies, certain driven Floquet systems and topologically non-trivial phases of matter where strong inversion-breaking spin-orbit coupling plays a role.