Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential
quant-ph, cond-mat.mes-hall
Submitted: 2026-06-16
Updated: 2026-10-10
Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure. Revised version with expanded discussion of the helical current, chiral coupling, and physical interpretation
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We show that a propagating electron wave in the lowest cylindrical channel carries a spin-resolved helical conserved current, and connect this current texture to its local chiral coupling.
Abstract
We show that a propagating electron wave in the lowest cylindrical channel carries a spin-resolved helical conserved current, and connect this current texture to its local chiral coupling. In a weakly relativistic positive-energy Dirac projection, the two sectors have the same azimuthally symmetric charge density and opposite circulation superposed on longitudinal flow, even though their nonrelativistic orbital harmonic is l=0. The current is radially distributed and extends into the evanescent tail. A scalar screw potential couples these modes through a derived vertex expressed by the chiral current overlap, J χ. Both spatial textures determine the coupling: the environmental radial profile weights the electronic circulation, while the screw harmonic selects correlated changes of spin sector and longitudinal momentum. For a uniform static harmonic, elastic energy conservation makes the first-order spin-flip amplitude vanish within the same transverse mode. Environmental energy exchange is therefore required to activate these selected channels. The same current overlap supplies the spatial kernel for heliciton-assisted inelastic scattering in a companion study and for a subsequent transport treatment of chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS).
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