Berry's phase and weak localization in the presence of spin-orbit interaction

Weak localization due to coherent back-scattering in the presence of spin-orbit coupling is examined for a possible manifestation of Berry's phase. The pairs of counter-propagating wave-amplitudes along the time-reversed Boltzmannian paths are shown to accumulate random relative phase which is purely geometric in the adiabatic limit. The resulting dephasing time τso has quartic field dependence and scales as Ci-1 and Ci-⅔, respectively, in two and three dimensions, where Ci is the spin-orbit impurity concentration. Optimal experimental conditions are discussed