Prediction of extremely long electron spin lifetimes at room temperature in wurtzite semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract

Many proposed spintronics devices require mobile electrons at room temperature with long spin lifetimes. One route to achieving this is to use quantum wells with tunable spin-orbit (SO) parameters. Research has focused on zinc-blende materials such as GaAs which do not have long spin lifetimes at room temperature. We show that wurtzite (w) materials, which possess smaller SO coupling due to being low-Z, are better suited for spintronics applications. This leads to predictions of spin lifetimes in w-AlN exceeding 2 ms at helium temperatures and, relevant to spintronic devices, spin lifetimes up to 0.5 $\mu s$ at room temperature.

4 pages, 1 figures. Accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters

References in corpus (15)

• Non-ballistic spin field-effect transistor
• An Exact SU(2) Symmetry and Persistent Spin Helix in a Spin-Orbit Coupled System
• Emergence of the persistent spin helix in semiconductor quantum wells
• Anomalous Spin Dephasing in (110) GaAs Quantum Wells: Anisotropy and Intersubband Effects
• Performance of a spin-based insulated gate field effect transistor
• Room temperature spin coherence in ZnO
• Gate-controlled spin-orbit interaction in a parabolic GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well
• Spin orbit coupling in bulk ZnO and GaN
• Suppression of the D'yakonov-Perel' spin relaxation mechanism for all spin components in [111] zincblende quantum wells
• Temperature dependence of D'yakonov-Perel' spin relaxation in zinc blende semiconductor quantum structures
• Anomalous k-dependent spin splitting in wurtzite AlxGa1-xN/GaN heterostructures
• Theory of Electron Spin Relaxation in ZnO
• Theory of Optical Orientation in n-Type Semiconductors
• Electrical control of spin coherence in ZnO
• Spin relaxation in $n$-type ZnO quantum wells

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Spin-orbit coupling in wurtzite quantum wells
• Spin-orbit effects in nanowire-based wurtzite semiconductor quantum dots
• Spin-relaxation time in the impurity band of wurtzite semiconductors
• Spin transport in polarization induced two dimensional confinement of carriers in wedge shaped \textit{c}-GaN nanowalls