Spin dynamics in the regime of hopping conductivity

Abstract

We consider spin dynamics in the impurity band of a semiconductor with spin-split spectrum. Due to the splitting, phonon-assisted hops from one impurity to another are accompanied by rotation of the electron spin, which leads to spin relaxation. The system is strongly inhomogeneous because of exponential variation of hopping times. However, at very small couplings an electron diffuses over a distance exceeding the characteristic scale of the inhomogeneity during the time of spin relaxation, so one can introduce an averaged spin relaxation rate. At larger values of coupling the system is effectively divided into two subsystems: the one where relaxation is very fast and another one where relaxation is rather slow. In this case, spin decays due to escape of the electrons from one subsystem to another. As a result, the spin dynamics is non-exponential and hardly depends on spin-orbit coupling.

References in corpus (1)

• Dyakonov-Perel spin relaxation near metal-insulator transition and in hopping transport

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Spin dynamics in semiconductors
• Spin relaxation of localized electrons in n-type semiconductors
• Spin relaxation near the metal-insulator transition: dominance of the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling
• Spin noise of localized electrons: Interplay of hopping and hyperfine interaction
• Electrical spin orientation, spin-galvanic and spin-Hall effects in disordered two-dimensional systems
• Microscopic dynamics of electron hopping in a semiconductor quantum well probed by spin-dependent photon echoes
• Universal power law decay of spin polarization in double quantum dot