Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach

Abstract

Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors is investigated from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach where all relevant scatterings, such as, the electron--nonmagnetic-impurity, electron-phonon, electron-electron, electron-hole, and electron-hole exchange (the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism) scatterings are explicitly included. The Elliot-Yafet mechanism is also fully incorporated. This approach offers a way toward thorough understanding of electron spin relaxation both near and far away from the equilibrium in the metallic regime. The dependence of the spin relaxation time on electron density, temperature, initial spin polarization, photo-excitation density, and hole density are studied thoroughly with the underlying physics analyzed. In contrast to the previous investigations in the literature, we find that: (i) In $n$-type materials, the Elliot-Yafet mechanism is {\em less} important than the D'yakonov-Perel' mechanism, even for the narrow band-gap semiconductors such as InSb and InAs. (ii) The density dependence of the spin relaxation time is nonmonotonic and we predict a {\em peak} in the metallic regime in both $n$-type and intrinsic materials. (iii) In intrinsic materials, the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism is found to be negligible compared with the D'yakonov-Perel' mechanism. We also predict a peak in the temperature dependence of spin relaxation time which is due to the nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the electron-electron Coulomb scattering in intrinsic materials with small initial spin polarization. (iv) In $p$-type III-V semiconductors, ...... (the remaining is omitted here due to the limit of space)

25 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Measurement of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit magnetic fields
• Room temperature spin coherence in ZnO
• High temperature spin dephasing in n-typed GaAs quantum wells
• Spin orbit coupling in bulk ZnO and GaN
• Effect of initial spin polarization on spin dephasing and electron g factor in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron system
• Hot-electron effect in spin dephasing in $n$-type GaAs quantum wells
• Detection of large magneto-anisotropy of electron spin dephasing in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron system in a $[001]$ GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well
• Multi-subband effect in spin dephasing in semiconductor quantum wells
• Spin relaxation due to the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism in intrinsic and $p$-type GaAs quantum wells from a fully microscopic approach
• Control of spin coherence in $n$-type GaAs quantum wells using strain
• Spin-orbit coupling in bulk GaAs
• Density dependence of spin relaxation in GaAs quantum well at room temperature
• Spin accumulation with spin-orbit interaction
• Multi-valley spin relaxation in the presence of high in-plane electric fields in $n$-type GaAs quantum wells
• Relaxation mechanism for electron spin in the impurity band of n-doped semiconductors
• Kinetics of spin coherence of electrons in $n$-type InAs quantum wells under intense terahertz laser fields
• Non-Markovian hole spin kinetics in $p$-type GaAs quantum wells

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Electron spin relaxation in paramagnetic Ga(Mn)As quantum wells
• Hole spin relaxation in [001] strained asymmetric Si/SiGe and Ge/SiGe quantum wells
• Spin relaxation in $n$-type ZnO quantum wells