arXiv subjects

Seongjin Ahn

Publications and source records attributed to Seongjin Ahn.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Screening, Friedel oscillations, RKKY interaction, and Drude transport in anisotropic two-dimensional systems

We investigate the effect of the mass anisotropy on Friedel Oscillations, Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction, screening properties, and Boltzmann transport in two dimensional (2D) metallic and doped semiconductor systems. We calculate the static polarizability and the dielectric function within the random phase approximation with the mass anisotropy fully taken into account without making any effective isotropic approximation in the theory. We find that carrier screening exhibits an isotropic behavior for small momenta despite the anisotropy of the system, and becomes strongly anisotropic above a certain threshold momentum. Such an anisotropy of screening leads to anisotropic Friedel oscillations, and an anisotropic RKKY interaction characterized by a periodicity dependent on the direction between the localized magnetic moments. We also explore the disorder limited dc transport properties in the presence of mass anisotropy based on the Boltzmann transport theory. Interestingly, we find that the anisotropy ratio of the short range disorder limited resistivity along the heavy- and light-mass directions is always the same as the mass anisotropy ratio whereas for the long range disorder limited resistivity the anisotropy ratio is the same as the mass ratio only in the low density limit, and saturates to the square root of the mass ratio in the high density limit. Our theoretical work should apply to many existing and to-be-discovered anisotropic 2D systems.

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arXiv2021

Microscopic bath effects on noise spectra in semiconductor quantum dot qubits

When a system is thermally coupled to only a small part of a larger bath, statistical fluctuations of the temperature (more precisely, the internal energy) of this "sub-bath" around the mean temperature defined by the larger bath can become significant. We show that these temperature fluctuations generally give rise to 1/f-like noise power spectral density from even a single two-level system. We extend these results to a distribution of fluctuators, finding the corresponding modification to the Dutta-Horn relation. Then we consider the specific situation of charge noise in silicon quantum dot qubits and show that recent experimental data [E. J. Connors, et al., Phys. Rev. B 100, 165305 (2019)] can be modeled as arising from as few as two two-level fluctuators, and accounting for sub-bath size improves the quality of the fit.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Theroy of anisotropic plasmons

We develop the complete theory for the collective plasmon modes of an interacting electron system in the presence of explicit mass (or velocity) anisotropy in the corresponding non-interacting situation, with the effective Fermi velocity being different along different axes. Such effective mass anisotropy is common in solid state materials (e.g., silicon or germanium), where the Fermi surface is often not spherical. We find that the plasmon dispersion itself develops significant anisotropy in such systems, and the commonly used isotropic approximation of using a density of states or optical effective mass does not work for the anisotropic system. We predict a qualitatively new phenomenon in anisotropic systems with no corresponding isotropic analog, where the plasmon mode along one direction decays into electron-hole pairs through Landau damping while the mode remains undamped and stable along a different directions

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arXiv2021

Anisotropic Fermionic Quasiparticles

We have carried out a comprehensive investigation of the quasiparticle properties of a two-dimensional electron gas, interacting via the long-range Coulomb interaction, in the presence of bare mass anisotropy (i.e. with an elliptic noninteracting Fermi surface) by calculating the self-energy, the spectral function, the scattering rate, and the effective mass within the leading order dynamical self-energy approximation. We find novel anisotropic features of quasiparticle properties that are not captured by the isotropic approximation where the anisotropic effective mass is replaced by the isotropic averaged density-of-states mass. Some of these interesting results are: (1) the renormalization of the quasiparticle spectrum becomes highly anisotropic as the quasiparticle energy increases away from the Fermi energy; (2) the inelastic scattering rate features a strong anisotropy, exhibiting an abrupt jump at different injected energies depending on the momentum direction of the injected electron; (3) the effective mass anisotropy is reduced by interactions. Our results and analysis show that the unjustified neglect of the mass anisotropy can lead to an incorrect description of quasiparticle properties of the anisotropic system although the use of an equivalent isotropic approximation using the density-of-states effective mass works as a reasonable approximation in many situations. We also provide a theory using the plasmon-pole approximation, commenting on its validity for anisotropic self-energy calculations. We comment also on the interaction effect on the Fermi surface topology, finding that the elliptic shape of the bare Fermi surface is preserved, with suppressed ellipticity, in the interacting system to a high degree of accuracy. Our theory provides a complete generalization of the existing isotropic many-body theory of interacting electrons to the corresponding anisotropic systems.

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arXiv2020

Fermi-surface topology and renormalization of bare ellipticity in an interacting anisotropic electron gas

We investigate effects of electron-electron interactions on the shape of the Fermi surface in an anisotropic two-dimensional electron gas using the `RPA-GW' self-energy approximation. We find that the interacting Fermi surface deviates from an ellipse, but not in an arbitrary way. The interacting Fermi surface has only two qualitatively distinct shapes for most values of $r_s$. The Fermi surface undergoes two distinct transitions between these two shapes as $r_s$ increases. For larger $r_s$, the degree of the deviation from an ellipse rapidly increases, but, in general, our theory provides a justification for the widely used elliptical Fermi surface approximation even for the interacting system since the non-elliptic corrections are quantitatively rather small except for very large $r_s$.

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arXiv2019

Optically-Controlled Orbitronics on a Triangular Lattice

The propagation of electrons in an orbital multiplet dispersing on a lattice can support anomalous transport phenomena deriving from an orbitally-induced Berry curvature. In striking contrast to the related situation in graphene, we find that anomalous transport for an $L=1$ multiplet on the primitive 2D triangular lattice is activated by easily implemented on-site and optically-tunable potentials. We demonstrate this for dynamics in a Bloch band where point degeneracies carrying opposite winding numbers are generically offset in energy, allowing both an anomalous charge Hall conductance with sign selected by off-resonance coupling to circularly-polarized light and a related anomalous orbital Hall conductance activated by layer buckling.

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arXiv2019

Optical conductivity of black phosphorus with a tunable electronic structure

Black phosphorus (BP) is a two-dimensional layered material composed of phosphorus atoms. Recently, it was demonstrated that external perturbations such as an electric field close the band gap in few-layer BP, and can even induce a band inversion, resulting in an insulator phase with a finite energy gap or a Dirac semimetal phase characterized by two separate Dirac nodes. At the transition between the two phases, a semi-Dirac state appears in which energy disperses linearly along one direction and quadratically along the other. In this work, we study the optical conductivity of few-layer BP using a lattice model and the corresponding continuum model, incorporating the effects of an external electric field and finite temperature. We find that the low-frequency optical conductivity scales a power law that differs depending on the phase, which can be utilized as an experimental signature of few-layer BP in different phases. We also systematically analyze the evolution of the material parameters as the electric field increases, and the consequence on the power-law behavior of the optical conductivity.

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arXiv2018

Type-II Dirac line node in strained Na3N

Dirac line node (DLN) semimetals are a class of topological semimetals that feature band-crossing lines in momentum space. We study the type-I and type-II classification of DLN semimetals by developing a criterion that determines the type using band velocities. Using first-principles calculations, we also predict that Na3N under an epitaxial tensile strain realizes a type-II DLN semimetal with vanishing spin-orbit coupling (SOC), characterized by the Berry phase that is Z2-quantized in the presence of inversion and time-reversal symmetries. The surface energy spectrum is calculated to demonstrate the topological phase, and the type-II nature is demonstrated by calculating the band velocities. We also develop a tight-binding model and a low-energy effective Hamiltonian that describe the low-energy electronic structure of strained Na3N. The occurrence of a DLN in Na3N under strain is captured in the optical conductivity, which we propose as a means to experimentally confirm the type-II class of the DLN semimetal.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

Electrodynamics on Fermi Cyclides in Nodal Line Semimetals

We study the frequency-dependent conductivity of nodal line semimetals (NLSMs), focusing on the effects of carrier density and energy dispersion on the nodal line. We find that the low-frequency conductivity has a rich spectral structure which can be understood using scaling rules derived from the geometry of their Dupin cyclide Fermi surfaces. We identify different frequency regimes, find scaling rules for the optical conductivity in each, and demonstrate them with numerical calculations of the inter- and intraband contributions to the optical conductivity using a low-energy model for a generic NLSM.

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arXiv2017

Optical conductivity of multi-Weyl semimetals

Multi-Weyl semimetals are new types of Weyl semimetals which have anisotropic non-linear energy dispersion and a topological charge larger than one, thus exhibiting a unique quantum response. Using a unified lattice model, we calculate the optical conductivity numerically in the multi-Weyl semimetal phase and in its neighboring gapped states, and obtain the characteristic frequency dependence of each phase analytically using a low-energy continuum model. The frequency dependence of longitudinal and transverse optical conductivities obeys scaling relations that are derived from the winding number of the parent multi-Weyl semimetal phase and can be used to distinguish these electronic states of matter.

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arXiv2016

Collective modes in multi-Weyl semimetals

We investigate collective modes in three dimensional (3D) gapless multi-Weyl semimetals with anisotropic energy band dispersions (i.e., $E\sim \sqrt{ k_{\parallel}^{2J} + k_z^2}$, where $k_{\parallel}$ and $k_z$ are wave vectors and $J$ is a positive integer). For comparison, we also consider the gapless semimetals with the isotropic band dispersions (i.e., $E\sim k^J$). We calculate analytically long-wavelength plasma frequencies incorporating interband transitions and chiral properties of carriers. For both the isotropic and anisotropic cases, we find that interband transitions and chirality lead to the depolarization shift of plasma frequencies. For the isotropic parabolic band dispersion (i.e., $N=2$, $E\sim k^2$), the long-wavelength plasma frequencies lie outside the single particle excitation regions for all carrier densities, and thus the plasmons do not decay via Landau damping. For the higher-order band dispersions ($N \ge 3$) the long-wavelength plasmons experience damping below a critical density. For systems with the anisotropic dispersion the density dependence of the long-wavelength plasma frequency along the direction of non-linear dispersion behaves like that of the isotropic linear band model ($N=1$), while along the direction of linear dispersion it behaves like that of the isotropic non-linear model ($N \ge 2$). Plasmons along both directions remain undamped over a broad range of densities due to the chirality induced depolarization shift. Our results provide a comprehensive picture of how band dispersion and chirality affect plasmon behaviors in 3D gapless chiral systems with the arbitrary band dispersion.

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arXiv2014

Inelastic carrier lifetime in a coupled graphene electron-phonon system: Role of plasmon-phonon coupling

We calculate the inelastic scattering rates and the hot electron inelastic mean free paths for both monolayer and bilayer graphene on a polar substrate. We study the quasiparticle self-energy by taking into account both electron-electron and electron-surface optical (SO) phonon interactions. In this calculation the leading order dynamic screening approximation (G$_0$W approximation) is used to obtain the quasiparticle self-energy by treating electrons and phonons on an equal footing. We find that the strong coupling between the SO phonon and plasmon leads to a new decay channel for the quasiparticle through the emission of the coupled mode, and gives rise to an abrupt increase in the scattering rate, which is absent in the uncoupled system. In monolayer graphene a single jump in the scattering rate occurs, arising from the emission of the low energy branch of the coupled plasmon-phonon modes. In bilayer graphene the emission of both low and high energy branches of the coupled modes contributes to the scattering rate and gives rise to two abrupt changes in the scattering rate. The jumps in the scattering rate can be potentially used in the hot electron device such as switching devices and oscillators.

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