``Hot Spots'' in Quasi-One-Dimensional Organic Conductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the distribution of electron scattering rates in quasi-one-dimensional conductors, identifying 'hot spots' with high scattering, and analyzes their impact on electrical resistance and magnetoresistance under magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized $ au$-approximation to study hot spots and their effects on resistance, revealing they do not cause significant magnetoresistance at specific angles.

Findings

Hot spots exhibit anomalously high scattering rates.

Hot spots do not significantly affect magnetoresistance at 'magic angles'.

The generalized $ au$-approximation effectively models the scattering distribution.

Abstract

Distribution of the electron scattering rate on the Fermi surface of a quasi-one-dimensional conductor is calculated for the electron-electron umklapp interaction. We find that in certain regions on the Fermi surface the scattering rate is anomalously high. The reason for the existence of these ``hot spots'' is analogous to the appearance of the van Hove singularities in the density of states. We employ a generalized $\tau$-approximation (where the scattering integral in the Boltzmann equation is replaced by the scattering time which depends on the position at the Fermi surface) to study the dependence of the electric resistance on the amplitude and the orientation of a magnetic field. We find that the ``hot spots'' do not produce a considerable magnetoresistance or commensurability effects at the so-called ``magic angles''.