Doppler velocimetry of spin propagation in a two-dimensional electron gas

Abstract

Controlling the flow of electrons by manipulation of their spin is a key to the development of spin-based electronics. While recent demonstrations of electrical-gate control in spin-transistor configurations show great promise, operation at room temperature remains elusive. Further progress requires a deeper understanding of the propagation of spin polarization, particularly in the high mobility semiconductors used for devices. Here we report the application of Doppler velocimetry to resolve the motion of spin-polarized electrons in GaAs quantum wells driven by a drifting Fermi sea. We find that the spin mobility tracks the high electron mobility precisely as a function of T. However, we also observe that the coherent precession of spins driven by spin-orbit interaction, which is essential for the operation of a broad class of spin logic devices, breaks down at temperatures above 150 K for reasons that are not understood theoretically.

References in corpus (4)

• 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
• Non-diffusive spin dynamics in a two-dimensional electron gas
• Spin polarization in biased Rashba-Dresselhaus two-dimensional electron systems

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Intrinsic exciton transport and recombination in single-crystal lead bromide perovskite
• Direct imprinting of arbitrary spin textures using programmable structured light in a semiconductor two-dimensional electron gas
• Evolution of the persistent spin helix in the presence of Hartree-Fock fields
• Microscopic theory for the Doppler velocimetry of spin propagation in semiconductor quantum wells
• Dressed excitations, thermodynamics and relaxation in the 1D XXZ Heisenberg model
• A perspective on inelastic light scattering spectroscopy for probing transport of collective acoustic excitations
• Nonlinear spin-Wave Doppler effect for flexible tuning of magnonic frequencies