On the pseudospin description of the electron Bloch bands

Abstract

We study the transformation properties of the electron states in crystals with spin-orbit coupling, focusing primarily on the limitations of the frequently used pseudospin-1/2 description of twofold degenerate Bloch bands. Using the language of corepresentations of magnetic point groups, we construct the Bloch bases across the Brillouin zone in a way which is consistent with all symmetry requirements. This construction is applied to derive the effective spin-orbit Hamiltonians in noncentrosymmetric crystals, known as the generalized Rashba models, in both single-band and multiband cases.