Spin lifetimes of electrons injected into GaAs and GaN

Abstract

The spin relaxation time of electrons in GaAs and GaN are determined with a model that includes momentum scattering by phonons and ionized impurities, and spin scattering by the Elliot-Yafet, D'yakonov-Perel, and Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanisms. Accurate bands generated using a long-range tight-binding Hamiltonian obtained from empirical pseudopotentials are used. The inferred temperature-dependence of the spin relaxation lifetime agrees well with measured values in GaAs. We further show that the spin lifetimes decrease rapidly with injected electrons energy and reach a local maximum at the longitudinal optical phonon energy. Our calculation predicts that electron spin lifetime in pure GaN is about 3 orders of magnitude longer than in GaAs at all temperatures, primarily as a result of the lower spin-orbit interaction and higher conduction band density of states.

8 pages and 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Spin relaxation of conduction electrons in bulk III-V semiconductors
• Electron Spin Decoherence in Bulk and Quantum Well Zincblende Semiconductors

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Spintronics: Fundamentals and applications
• Spin dynamics in semiconductors
• Questaal: a package of electronic structure methods based on the linear muffin-tin orbital technique
• Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach
• Large Bychkov-Rashba spin-orbit coupling in high-mobility GaN/AlGaN heterostructures
• Spin relaxation in $n$-type GaAs quantum wells from a full microscopic approach
• Hole spin dephasing in $p$-type semiconductor quantum wells
• Half-metallicity and efficient spin injection in AlN/GaN:Cr (0001) heterostructure
• Room temperature Optical Orientation of Exciton Spin in cubic GaN/AlN quantum dots
• Spin relaxation under identical Dresselhaus and Rashba coupling strengths in GaAs quantum wells
• Experimental determination of Rashba spin-orbit coupling in wurtzite $n$-GaN:Si
• Effect of electron-electron scattering on spin dephasing in a high-mobility low-density twodimensional electron gas
• Electron spin relaxation in cubic GaN quantum dots
• Electrical characterization of all-epitaxial Fe/GaN(0001) Schottky tunnel contacts
• Spin-relaxation time in the impurity band of wurtzite semiconductors
• Spin-orbit coupling and $g$-factor of $X$-valley in cubic GaN
• Resonance-like electrical control of electron spin for microwave measurement