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Gauge transformations of spin-orbit interactions in graphene

Abstract:

Inclusion of spin-dependent interactions in graphene in the vicinity of the Dirac points can be posed in terms of non-Abelian gauge potentials. Such gauge potentials being surrogates of physical electric fields and material parameters, only enjoy a limited gauge freedom. A general gauge transformation thus changes the physical model. We argue that this property can be useful in connecting reference physical situations, such as free particle or Rashba interactions to non-trivial physical Hamiltonians with a new set of spin-orbit interactions, albeit constrained to being isoenergetic. We analyse different combinations of spin-orbit interactions in the case of monolayer graphene and show how they are related by means of selected non-Abelian gauge transformations.