Chaotic Cyclotron and Hall Trajectories Due to Spin-Orbit Coupling

It is demonstrated that the synergistic effect of a gauge field, Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC), and Zeeman splitting can generate chaotic cyclotron and Hall trajectories of particles. The physical origin of the chaotic behavior is that the SOC produces a spin-dependent (so-called anomalous) contribution to the particle velocity and the presence of Zeeman field reduces the number of integrals of motion. By using analytical and numerical arguments, the conditions of chaos emergence are studied and the dynamics both in the regular and chaotic regimes is reported. The critical dependence of the dynamic patterns (such as the chaotic regime onset) on small variations in the initial conditions and problem parameters, that is the SOC and/or Zeeman constants, is observed. The transition to chaotic regime is further verified by the analysis of phase portraits as well as Lyapunov exponents spectrum. The considered chaotic behavior can occur in solid state systems, weakly relativistic plasmas, and cold atomic gases with synthetic gauge fields and spin-related couplings.