Spin-lattice relaxation times of single donors and donor clusters in silicon

Abstract

An atomistic method of calculating the spin-lattice relaxation times ($T_1$) is presented for donors in silicon nanostructures comprising of millions of atoms. The method takes into account the full band structure of silicon including the spin-orbit interaction. The electron-phonon Hamiltonian, and hence the deformation potential, is directly evaluated from the strain-dependent tight-binding Hamiltonian. The technique is applied to single donors and donor clusters in silicon, and explains the variation of $T_1$ with the number of donors and electrons, as well as donor locations. Without any adjustable parameters, the relaxation rates in a magnetic field for both systems are found to vary as $B^5$ in excellent quantitative agreement with experimental measurements. The results also show that by engineering electronic wavefunctions in nanostructures, $T_1$ times can be varied by orders of magnitude.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum control of donor electrons at the Si-SiO2 interface
• Engineered valley-orbit splittings in quantum confined nanostructures in silicon

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