Spin relaxation near the metal-insulator transition: dominance of the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We identify the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling as the source of the dominant spin-relaxation mechanism in the impurity band of doped semiconductors. The Dresselhaus-type (i.e. allowed by bulk-inversion asymmetry) hopping terms are derived and incorporated into a tight-binding model of impurity sites, and they are shown to unexpectedly dominate the spin relaxation, leading to spin-relaxation times in good agreement with experimental values. This conclusion is drawn from two complementary approaches employed to extract the spin-relaxation time from the effective Hamiltonian: an analytical diffusive-evolution calculation and a numerical finite-size scaling.

4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (5)

• Measurement of Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit magnetic fields
• Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach
• Cubic Dresselhaus Spin-Orbit Coupling in 2D Electron Quantum Dots
• Dyakonov-Perel spin relaxation near metal-insulator transition and in hopping transport
• Relaxation mechanism for electron spin in the impurity band of n-doped semiconductors

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• Spin Relaxation in Materials Lacking Coherent Charge Transport
• Closing the gap between spatial and spin dynamics of electrons at the metal-to-insulator transition
• Multivalley spin relaxation in $n$-type bulk GaAs in the presence of high electric fields
• Spin freezing by Anderson localization in one-dimensional semiconductors
• Charge and spin diffusion on the metallic side of the metal-insulator transition: a self-consistent approach
• Spin-relaxation time in the impurity band of wurtzite semiconductors
• Knight shift and nuclear spin relaxation in Fe/n-GaAs heterostructures
• Time-resolved lateral spin-caloric transport of optically generated spin packets in n-GaAs