We present a unified treatment of Zitterbewegung phenomena for a wide class of systems including spintronic, graphene, and superconducting systems. We derive an explicit expression for the time dependence of the position operator of the quasiparticles which can be decomposed into a mean part and an oscillatory term. The latter corresponds to the Zitterbewegung. To apply our result for different systems, one needs to use only vector algebra instead of the more complicated operator algebra.

• Received 4 September 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.74.172305