Relaxation mechanism for electron spin in the impurity band of n-doped semiconductors

Abstract

We propose a mechanism to describe spin relaxation in n-doped III-V semiconductors close to the Mott metal-insulator transition. Taking into account the spin-orbit interaction induced spin admixture in the hydrogenic donor states, we build a tight-binding model for the spin-dependent impurity band. Since the hopping amplitudes with spin flip are considerably smaller than the spin conserving counterparts, the resulting spin lifetime is very large. We estimate the spin lifetime from the diffusive accumulation of spin rotations associated with the electron hopping. Our result is larger but of the same order of magnitude than the experimental value. Therefore the proposed mechanism has to be included when describing spin relaxation in the impurity band.

4 pages

References in corpus (1)

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

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Semiconductor Spin Noise Spectroscopy: Fundamentals, Accomplishments, and Challenges
• Electron spin relaxation in bulk III-V semiconductors from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach
• Electrical spin orientation, spin-galvanic and spin-Hall effects in disordered two-dimensional systems
• Spin Relaxation in Materials Lacking Coherent Charge Transport
• Closing the gap between spatial and spin dynamics of electrons at the metal-to-insulator transition
• Spin-relaxation time in the impurity band of wurtzite semiconductors