Quantum Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional electron gas in presence of Rashba interaction

TL;DR

This paper develops a specialized Quantum Monte Carlo method to study the effects of Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the ground state energy of a two-dimensional electron gas, providing insights into spin-dependent phenomena.

Contribution

A novel imaginary time spin-dependent propagator for Diffusion Monte Carlo enabling the study of Rashba interactions in many-electron systems.

Findings

Ground state energy dependence on Rashba strength and density

Comparison with Hartree-Fock results shows consistency

Method applicable to systems with spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We introduce a variant to the Diffusion Monte Carlo algorithm that can be employed to study the effects of the Rashba interaction in a many electron systems. Because of the spin--orbit nature of Rashba interaction a standard algorithm cannot be applied and therefore a specific imaginary time spin dependent propagator has been developed and implemented following previous work developed in the framework of nuclear physics. We computed the ground state energy of the 2D electron gas at different densities for several values of the Rashba interaction strength as a function of "Rashba spin states" polarization. Comparison is given with analytically known Hartree-Fock results and for the system in absence of Coulomb interaction.