Electron spin relaxation in rippled graphene with low mobilities

Abstract

We investigate spin relaxation in rippled graphene where curvature induces a Zeeman-like spin-orbit coupling with opposite effective magnetic fields along the graphene plane in $\mathbf{K}$ and ${\mathbf{K}}^{\prime }$ valleys. The joint effect of this Zeeman-like spin-orbit coupling and the intervalley electron-optical phonon scattering opens a spin relaxation channel, which manifests itself in low-mobility samples with the electron mean free path being smaller than the ripple size. Due to this spin relaxation channel, with the increase of temperature, the relaxation time for spins perpendicular to the effective magnetic field first decreases and then increases, with a minimum of several hundred picoseconds around room temperature. However, the spin relaxation along the effective magnetic field is determined by the curvature-induced Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling, leading to a temperature-insensitive spin relaxation time of the order of microseconds. Therefore, the in-plane spin relaxation in low-mobility rippled graphene is anisotropic. Nevertheless, in the presence of a small perpendicular magnetic field, as usually applied in the Hanle spin precession measurement, the anisotropy of spin relaxation is strongly suppressed.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• The electronic properties of graphene
• Andreev reflection and Klein tunneling in graphene
• Intrinsic and Rashba Spin-orbit Interactions in Graphene Sheets
• Colloquium: The transport properties of graphene: An introduction
• Spin-orbit coupling in curved graphene, fullerenes, nanotubes, and nanotube caps
• Acoustic phonon scattering limited carrier mobility in 2D extrinsic graphene
• Landau Level Splitting in Graphene in High Magnetic Fields
• Substrate limited electron dynamics in graphene
• Electron Transport and Hot Phonons in Carbon Nanotubes
• Manipulation of Spin Transport in Graphene by Surface Chemical Doping
• Electron spin relaxation in graphene with random Rashba field: Comparison of D'yakonov-Perel' and Elliott-Yafet--like mechanisms
• Transport in suspended graphene
• Curvature-induced spin-orbit coupling and spin relaxation in a chemically clean single-layer graphene
• Electron spin relaxation in graphene from a microscopic approach: Role of electron-electron interaction
• Electron spin diffusion and transport in graphene
• Lattice-Induced Double-Valley Degeneracy Lifting in Magnetic Field in Graphene

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Electron spin relaxation due to D'yakonov-Perel' and Elliot-Yafet mechanisms in monolayer MoS${}_2$: Role of intravalley and intervalley processes
• Intrinsic electron spin relaxation due to the D'yakonov-Perel' mechanism in monolayer MoS${}_2$
• Absence of hyperfine effects in ${}^{13}$C-graphene spin valve devices
• Optical spin injection in graphene with Rashba spin-orbit interaction
• Electron spin diffusion in monolayer MoS${}_2$
• Electron spin relaxation in bilayer graphene
• Hole spin relaxation in bilayer WSe${}_2$
• A novel superconducting-velocity--tunable quasiparticle state and spin relaxation in GaAs (100) quantum wells in proximity to $s$-wave superconductor
• Spin diffusion in p-type bilayer WSe${}_2$