Non-adiabatic Berry phase for semiconductor heavy holes under the coexistence of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-adiabatic Berry phase in semiconductor heavy holes with Rashba and Dresselhaus interactions, revealing how non-adiabatic effects and quasi-degenerate points influence the Berry phase and induce resonant phenomena.

Contribution

It formulates the non-Abelian Berry connection and phase for multiband systems with spin-orbit interactions, highlighting non-adiabatic effects and off-diagonal components in semiconductor holes.

Findings

Non-adiabatic processes alter the Berry phase quantization.

Quasi-degenerate points enhance intersubband transitions.

Off-diagonal components cause discontinuities and resonant repulsion.

Abstract

We formulate the non-Abelian Berry connection (tensor $\mathbb R$) and phase (matrix $\boldsymbol \Gamma$) for a multiband system and apply them to semiconductor holes under the coexistence of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions. For this purpose, we focus on the heavy-mass holes confined in a SiGe two-dimensional quantum well, whose electronic structure and spin texture are explored by the extended $\boldsymbol{k}\cdot\boldsymbol{p}$ approach. The strong intersubband interaction in the valence band causes quasi-degenerate points except for point $\Gamma$ of the Brillouin zone center. These points work as the singularity and change the Abelian Berry phase by the quantization of $\pi$ under the adiabatic process. To explore the influence by the non-adiabatic process, we perform the contour integral of $\mathbb R$ faithfully along the equi-energy surface by combining the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation with the semi-classical equation-of-motion for cyclotron motion and then calculate the energy dependence of $\boldsymbol \Gamma$ computationally. In addition to the function as a Dirac-like singularity, the quasi-degenerate point functions in enhancing the intersubband transition via the non-adiabatic process. Consequently, the off-diagonal components generate both in $\mathbb R$ and $\boldsymbol \Gamma$, and the simple $\pi$-quantization found in the Abelian Berry phase is violated. More interestingly, these off-diagonal terms cause "resonant repulsion" at the quasi-degenerate energy and result in the discontinuity in the energy profile of $\boldsymbol \Gamma$.