Abstract

We study theoretically the disorder--induced smearing of the density of states in a two--dimensional electron system taking into account a spin--orbit term in the Hamiltonian of a free electron. We show that the characteristic energy scale for the smearing increases with increasing the spin--orbit coupling. We also demonstrate that in the limit of a strong spin--orbit coupling the diagrams with self--intersections give a parametrically small contribution to the self--energy. As a result, the coherent potential approximation becomes asymptotically exact in this limit. The tail of the density of states has the energy scale which is much smaller than the magnitude of the smearing. We find the shape of the tail using the instanton approach.

Date

January 1, 1970

Authors

Aram Galstyan, Mikhail Raikh

Journal

APS Four Corners Section Meeting Abstracts

Pages

A3. 04