High-temperature magneto-inter-chirality oscillations in 2D systems with strong spin–orbit coupling

Abstract

Conventional Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations of conductivity in 3D are washed out as the temperature exceeds the spacing between the Landau levels. This is due to smearing of the Fermi distribution. In 2D, in the presence of two or more size-quantization subbands, there is an additional type of magneto-oscillations, usually referred to as magneto-inter-subband oscillations, which do not decay exponentially with temperature. The period of these oscillations is determined by the condition that the energy separation between the subbands contains an integer number of Landau levels. Under this condition, which does not contain the Fermi distribution, the inter-subband scattering rate is maximal. Here we show that, with only one subband, high-temperature oscillations are still possible. They develop when the electron spectrum is split due to the spin–orbit coupling. For these additional oscillations, the coupling enters both the period and the decay rate.