Effective field theories for electrons in crystalline structures

Abstract

We present an effective field theory formulation for a class of condensed matter systems with crystalline structures for which some of the discrete symmetries of the underlying crystal survive the long distance limit, up to mesoscopic scales, and argue that this class includes interesting materials, such as Si-doped GaAs. The surviving symmetries determine a limited set of possible effective interactions that we analyze in detail for the case of Si-doped GaAs materials. These coincide with the ones proposed in the literature to describe the spin relaxation times for the Si-doped GaAs materials, obtained here as a consequence of the choice of effective fields and their symmetries. The resulting low-energy effective theory is described in terms of three (six chiral) one-dimensional Luttinger liquid systems and their corresponding intervalley transitions. We also discuss the Mott transition within the context of the effective theory.