Electrical and thermoelectric transport properties of two-dimensional fermionic systems with k-cubic spin–orbit coupling

Abstract

We investigate the effect of k-cubic spin–orbit interaction on the electrical and thermoelectric transport properties of two-dimensional fermionic systems. We obtain exact analytical expressions of the inverse relaxation time (IRT) and the Drude conductivity for long-range Coulomb and short-range delta scattering potentials. The IRT reveals that the scattering is completely suppressed along the three directions with . We also obtain analytical results of the thermopower and thermal conductivity at low temperature. The thermoelectric transport coefficients obey the Wiedemann-Franz law, even in the presence of k-cubic Rashba spin–orbit interaction (RSOI) at low temperature. In the presence of a quantizing magnetic field, the signature of the RSOI is revealed through the appearance of the beating pattern in the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations of thermopower and thermal conductivity in the low magnetic field regime. The empirical formulae for the SdH oscillation frequencies accurately describe the locations of the beating nodes. The beating pattern in magnetothermoelectric measurement can be used to extract the spin–orbit coupling constant.