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

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....

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Tamborenea, Pablo Ignacio, Weinmann, Dietmar, Jalabert, Rodolfo
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2007
País:Argentina
Institución:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/67523
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/67523
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Semiconductors
Spintronics
Spin-Orbit Interaction
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Descripción
Sumario: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. © 2007 The American Physical Society.