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A H MacDonald

Publications and source records attributed to A H MacDonald.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Charge and spin Hall conductivity in metallic graphene.

Graphene has an unusual low-energy band structure with four chiral bands and half-quantized and quantized Hall effects that have recently attracted theoretical and experimental attention. We study the Fermi energy and disorder dependence of its spin Hall conductivity sigma(xy)(SH). In the metallic regime we find that vertex corrections enhance the intrinsic spin Hall conductivity and that skew scattering can lead to sigma(xy)(SH) values that exceed the quantized ones expected when the chemical potential is inside the spin-orbit induced energy gap. We predict that large spin Hall conductivities will be observable in graphene even when the spin-orbit gap does not survive disorder.

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PubMed2005

Interlayer transport in bilayer quantum Hall systems.

Bilayer quantum Hall systems have a broken symmetry ground state at a filling factor which can be viewed either as an excitonic superfluid or as a pseudospin ferromagnet. We present a theory of interlayer transport in quantum Hall bilayers that highlights remarkable similarities and critical differences between transport in Josephson junction and ferromagnetic metal spin-transfer devices. Our theory is able to explain the size of the large but finite low-bias interlayer conductance and the voltage width of this collective transport anomaly.

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PubMed2005

Itinerant ferromagnetism in an ultracold atom fermi gas.

We address the possible occurrence of ultracold atom ferromagnetism by evaluating the free energy of a spin polarized Fermi gas to second order in its interaction parameter. We find that Hartree-Fock theory underestimates the tendency toward ferromagnetism, predict that the ferromagnetic transition is first order at low temperatures, and point out that the spin coherence time of gases prepared in a ferromagnetic state is strongly enhanced as the transition is approached. We relate our results to recent experiments.

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PubMed2005

Realization of fully frustrated Josephson-junction arrays with cold atoms.

Fully frustrated Josephson-junction arrays (FF-JJA's) exhibit a subtle compound phase transition in which an Ising transition associated with discrete broken translational symmetry and a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition associated with quasi-long-range phase coherence occur nearly simultaneously. In this Letter we discuss a cold-atom realization of the FF-JJA system. We demonstrate that both orders can be studied by standard momentum-distribution-function measurements and present numerical results, based on a successful self-consistent spin-wave approximation, that illustrate the expected behavior of observables.

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PubMed2004

Interactions suppress quasiparticle tunneling at Hall bar constrictions.

Tunneling of fractionally charged quasiparticles across a two-dimensional electron system on a fractional quantum Hall plateau is expected to be strongly enhanced at low temperatures. This theoretical prediction is at odds with recent experimental studies of samples with weakly pinched quantum-point-contact constrictions in which the opposite behavior is observed. We argue here that this unexpected finding is a consequence of electron-electron interactions near the point contact.

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PubMed2004

Coherently photoinduced ferromagnetism in diluted magnetic semiconductors.

Ferromagnetism is predicted in undoped diluted magnetic semiconductors illuminated by intense sub-band-gap laser radiation. The mechanism for photoinduced ferromagnetism is coherence between conduction and valence bands induced by the light which leads to an optical exchange interaction. The ferromagnetic critical temperature T(C) depends both on the properties of the material and on the frequency and intensity of the laser and could be above 1K.

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PubMed2004

Semiclassical spin transport in spin-orbit-coupled bands.

Motivated by recent interest in novel spintronics effects, we develop a semiclassical theory of spin transport that is valid for spin-orbit coupled bands. Aside from the obvious convective term in which the average spin is transported at the wave packet group velocity, the spin current has additional contributions from the wave packet's spin and torque dipole moments. Electric field corrections to the group velocity and carrier spin contribute to the convective term. Summing all terms we obtain an expression for the intrinsic spin-Hall conductivity of a hole-doped semiconductor, which agrees with the Kubo formula prediction for the same quantity. We discuss the calculation of spin accumulation, which illustrates the importance of the torque dipole near the boundary of the system.

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PubMed2004

Universal intrinsic spin Hall effect.

We describe a new effect in semiconductor spintronics that leads to dissipationless spin currents in paramagnetic spin-orbit coupled systems. We argue that in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron system with substantial Rashba spin-orbit coupling, a spin current that flows perpendicular to the charge current is intrinsic. In the usual case where both spin-orbit split bands are occupied, the intrinsic spin-Hall conductivity has a universal value for zero quasiparticle spectral broadening.

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PubMed2004

First principles calculation of anomalous Hall conductivity in ferromagnetic bcc Fe.

We perform a first principles calculation of the anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic bcc Fe. Our theory identifies an intrinsic contribution to the anomalous Hall conductivity and relates it to the k-space Berry phase of occupied Bloch states. This dc conductivity has the same origin as the well-known magneto-optical effect, and our result accounts for experimental measurement on Fe crystals with no adjustable parameters.

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PubMed2003

Chern numbers for spin models of transition metal nanomagnets.

We argue that ferromagnetic transition metal nanoparticles with fewer than approximately 100 atoms can be described by an effective Hamiltonian with a single giant spin degree of freedom. The total spin S of the effective Hamiltonian is specified by a Berry curvature Chern number that characterizes the topologically nontrivial dependence of a nanoparticle's many-electron wave function on magnetization orientation. The Berry curvatures and associated Chern numbers have a complex dependence on spin-orbit coupling in the nanoparticle and influence the semiclassical Landau-Liftshitz equations that describe magnetization-orientation dynamics.

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PubMed2003

Measuring the condensate fraction of rapidly rotating trapped boson systems: off-diagonal order from the density profile.

We demonstrate a direct connection between the density profile of a system of ultracold trapped bosonic particles in the rapid-rotation limit and its condensate fraction. This connection can be used to probe the crossover from condensed vortex-lattice states to uncondensed quantum-fluid states that occurs in rapidly rotating boson systems as the particle density decreases or the rotation frequency increases. We illustrate our proposal with a series of examples, including ones based on models of realistic finite trap systems, and comment on its application to freely expanding boson density profile measurements.

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PubMed2002

Theory of ferromagnetism in doped excitonic condensates.

Nesting in a semimetal can lead to an excitonic-insulator state with spontaneous coherence between conduction and valence bands and a gap for charged excitations. We present a theory of the ferromagnetic state that occurs when the density of electrons in the conduction band and holes in the valence band differ. We find an unexpectedly rich doping-field phase diagram and an unusual collective excitation spectrum that includes two gapless collective modes. We predict regions of doping and external field in which phase-separated condensates of electrons and holes with parallel spins and opposing spins coexist.

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PubMed2002

Quantum melting and absence of Bose-Einstein condensation in two-dimensional vortex matter.

We demonstrate that quantum fluctuations suppress Bose-Einstein condensation of quasi-two-dimensional bosons in a rapidly rotating trap. Our conclusions rest in part on the derivation of an exact expression for the boson action in terms of vortex position coordinates, and in part on a solution of the weakly interacting boson Bogoliubov equations, which simplify in the rapid-rotation limit. We obtain analytic expressions for the collective-excitation dispersion, which is quadratic rather than linear. Our estimates for the boson filling factor at which the vortex lattice melts are consistent with recent exact-diagonalization calculations.

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PubMed2002

Anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic semiconductors.

We present a theory of the anomalous Hall effect in ferromagnetic (III, Mn)V semiconductors. Our theory relates the anomalous Hall conductance of a homogeneous ferromagnet to the Berry phase acquired by a quasiparticle wave function upon traversing closed paths on the spin-split Fermi surface. The quantitative agreement between our theory and experimental data in both (In, Mn)As and (Ga, Mn)As systems suggests that this disorder independent contribution to the anomalous Hall conductivity dominates in diluted magnetic semiconductors. The success of this model for (III, Mn)V materials is unprecedented in the longstanding effort to understand origins of the anomalous Hall effect in itinerant ferromagnets.

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PubMed2002

Noncollinear ferromagnetism in (III,Mn)V semiconductors.

We investigate the stability of the collinear ferromagnetic state in kinetic exchange models for (III,Mn)V semiconductors with randomly distributed Mn ions. Our results suggest that noncollinear ferromagnetism is common to these semiconductor systems. The instability of the collinear state is due to long-range fluctuations involving a large fraction of the localized magnetic moments. We address conditions that favor the occurrence of noncollinear ground states and discuss unusual behavior that we predict for the temperature and field dependence of its saturation magnetization.

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PubMed2001

2D bands and electron-phonon interactions in polyacene plastic transistors.

We present a simple tight-binding model for the two-dimensional energy bands of polyacene field-effect transistors and for the coupling of these bands to lattice vibrations of their host molecular crystal. We argue that the strongest electron-phonon interactions in these systems originate from the dependence of intermolecule hopping amplitudes on collective molecular motion, and introduce a generalized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and is parameter-free once the band mass has been specified. We compute alpha(2)F(omega) as a function of two-dimensional hole density, and are able to explain the onset of superconductivity near 2D carrier density n(2D) approximately 10(14) cm(-2), observed in recent experiments.

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