Schmidt, Thomas and Rachel, Stephan and von Oppen, Felix and Glazman, Leonid (2012) Inelastic electron Backscattering in a generic helical edge channel. Physical Review Letters, 108 (15). ISSN 0031-9007
We evaluate the low-temperature conductance of a weakly interacting one-dimensional helical liquid without axial spin symmetry. The lack of that symmetry allows for inelastic backscattering of a single electron, accompanied by forward scattering of another. This joint effect of weak interactions and potential scattering off impurities results in a temperature-dependent deviation from the quantized conductance, delta G proportional to T-4. In addition, delta G is sensitive to the position of the Fermi level. We determine numerically the parameters entering our generic model for the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang Hamiltonian of a HgTe/CdTe quantum well in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling.
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