Nanospintronics meets relativistic quantum physics: Ubiquity of Zitterbewegung effects

TL;DR

This paper provides a unified theoretical framework for understanding zitterbewegung-like effects across various electron systems, bridging nonrelativistic and ultrarelativistic regimes in nanospintronics and quantum physics.

Contribution

It introduces a unified description of zitterbewegung phenomena applicable to diverse electron systems, highlighting their fundamental connection across different physical regimes.

Findings

Unified description links nonrelativistic and ultrarelativistic systems.

Reveals the ubiquity of zitterbewegung effects in nanospintronics.

Highlights the connection between Rashba systems and graphene.

Abstract

We present a unified description of zitterbewegung-like phenomena for electron and hole systems showing Rashba spin splitting as well as for electrons in single-layer and bilayer graphene. The former class of systems can be interpreted as "nonrelativistic" whereas the latter are often called "ultrarelativistic" so that our unified description indicates an interesting connection between these two opposite limits.