We develop a hydrodynamic description of transport properties in graphene-based systems, which we derive from the quantum kinetic equation. In the interaction-dominated regime, the collinear ...scattering singularity in the collision integral leads to fast unidirectional thermalization and allows us to describe the system in terms of three macroscopic currents carrying electric charge, energy, and quasiparticle imbalance. Within this "three-mode" approximation, we evaluate transport coefficients in monolayer graphene as well as in double-layer graphene-based structures. The resulting classical magnetoresistance is strongly sensitive to the interplay between the sample geometry and leading relaxation processes. In small, mesoscopic samples, the macroscopic currents are inhomogeneous, which leads to a linear magnetoresistance in classically strong fields. Applying our theory to double-layer graphene-based systems, we provide a microscopic foundation for a phenomenological description of giant magnetodrag at charge neutrality and find the magnetodrag and Hall drag in doped graphene.
We compare the conductance of an undoped graphene sheet with a small region subject to an electrostatic gate potential for the cases that the dynamics in the gated region is regular (disc-shaped ...region) and classically chaotic (stadium). For the disc, we find sharp resonances that narrow upon reducing the area fraction of the gated region. We relate this observation to the existence of confined electronic states. For the stadium, the conductance loses its dependence on the gate voltage upon reducing the area fraction of the gated region, which signals the lack of confinement of Dirac quasiparticles in a gated region with chaotic classical electron dynamics.
We formulate a general microscopic approach to spin-orbit torques in thin ferromagnet/heavy-metal bilayers in linear response to electric current or electric field. The microscopic theory we develop ...avoids the notion of spin currents and spin-Hall effect. Instead, the torques are directly related to a local spin polarization of conduction electrons, which is computed from generalized Kubo-Středa formulas. A symmetry analysis provides a one-to-one correspondence between polarization susceptibility tensor components and different torque terms in the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation for magnetization dynamics. The spin-orbit torques arising from Rashba or Dresselhaus type of spin-orbit interaction are shown to have different symmetries. We analyze these spin-orbit torques microscopically for a generic electron model in the presence of an arbitrary smooth magnetic texture. For a model with spin-independent disorder we find a major cancellation of the torques. In this case the only remaining torque corresponds to the magnetization-independent Edelstein effect. Furthermore, our results are applied to analyze the dynamics of a skyrmion under the action of electric current.
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) is investigated in a 2D ferromagnet (FM) with spin-orbit interaction of Rashba type at finite temperatures. The FM is described in the continuum limit by an ...effective s-d model with arbitrary dependence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and kinetic energy of itinerant electrons on the absolute value of momentum. In the limit of weak SOC, we derive a general expression for the DMI constant D from a microscopic analysis of the electronic grand potential. We compare D with the exchange stiffness A and show that, to the leading order in small SOC strength α_{R}, the conventional relation D=(4mα_{R}/ℏ)A, in general, does not hold beyond the Bychkov-Rashba model. Moreover, in this model, both A and D vanish at zero temperature in the metal regime (i.e., when two spin sub-bands are partly occupied). For nonparabolic bands or nonlinear Rashba coupling, these coefficients are finite and acquire a nontrivial dependence on the chemical potential that demonstrates the possibility to control the size and chirality of magnetic textures by adjusting a gate voltage.