The experimental progress in synthesizing low dimensional nanostructures where carriers are confined to bent surfaces has boosted the interest in the theory of quantum mechanics on curved two-dimensional manifolds. The current theoretical paradigm relies on a thin wall quantization method introduced by Da Costa [2]. In Ref.[3] Jensen and Dandoloff find that when employing the thin wall quantization in presence of externally applied electric and magnetic fields, an unphysical orbital magnetic moment appears. This anomalous result is taken as evidence for the breakdown of the thin wall quantization. We show, however, that in a proper treatment within the Da Costa framework: (i) this anomalous contribution is absent and (ii) there is no coupling between external electromagnetic field and surface curvature [1].
PACS numbers:To derive the thin wall quantization in presence of external electromagnetic field we start with the Schrödinger equation that is minimally coupled with the four component vector potential in a generic curved threedimensional space. Adopting Einstein summation convention and tensor covariant and contravariant components, we havewhere Q is the particle charge, G ij are the contravariant components of the metric tensor and A i are the covariant components of the vector potential A with the scalar potential defined by V = −A 0 . The covariant derivative D i is as usual defined bywhere v j are the covariant components of a vector field v and Γ k ij are the Christoffel symbolsFrom Eq. (1) one obtainswhere for convenience we introduced the time gauge covariant derivative D 0 = ∂ t − iQA 0 / . To proceed further, it is useful to define a coordinate system. As in Ref.[2-4] we consider a surface S with parametric equations r = r(q 1 , q 2 ). The portion of the 3D space in the immediate neighborhood of S can be then parametrized as R(q 1 , q 2 ) = r(q 1 , q 2 ) + q 3N (q 1 , q 2 ) withN (q 1 , q 2 ) the unit vector normal to S. We then find, in agreement with previous studies [2][3][4], the relations among G ij and the covariant components of the 2D surface metric tensor g ij to bewith α indicating the Weingarten curvature tensor of the surface S [2, 4]. We recall that the mean curvature M and the Gaussian curvature K of the surface S are related to the Weingarten curvature tensor byNow we can apply the thin-layer procedure introduced by Da Costa [2] and take into account the effect of a confining potential V λ (q 3 ), where λ is a squeezing parameter that controls the strength of the confining potential. When λ is large, the total wavefunction will be localized in a narrow range close to q 3 = 0. This allows one to take the q 3 → 0 limit in the Schrödinger equation. For the sake of clarity, it is better to introduce the indices a, b which can assume the values 1, 2 alone. From the structure of the metric tensor, one finds the following limiting relations:With this, the Schrödinger equation Eq. (2) can be then recast aswhere H S is an effective 2D Hamiltonian that depends on the surface S alone and readsTh...