Prediction of extremely long electron spin lifetimes at room temperature in wurtzite semiconductor quantum wells

TL;DR

This paper predicts that wurtzite semiconductor quantum wells can achieve extremely long electron spin lifetimes at room temperature, surpassing those in traditional zinc-blende materials, which is promising for spintronics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that wurtzite materials with smaller spin-orbit coupling can have significantly longer spin lifetimes, especially at room temperature, compared to zinc-blende counterparts.

Findings

Spin lifetimes in w-AlN exceed 2 ms at helium temperatures.

Spin lifetimes up to 0.5 microseconds are predicted at room temperature.

Wurtzite materials are more suitable for spintronics due to their longer spin lifetimes.

Abstract

Many proposed spintronics devices require mobile electrons at room temperature with long spin lifetimes. One route to achieving this is to use quantum wells with tunable spin-orbit (SO) parameters. Research has focused on zinc-blende materials such as GaAs which do not have long spin lifetimes at room temperature. We show that wurtzite (w) materials, which possess smaller SO coupling due to being low-Z, are better suited for spintronics applications. This leads to predictions of spin lifetimes in w-AlN exceeding 2 ms at helium temperatures and, relevant to spintronic devices, spin lifetimes up to 0.5 $\mu s$ at room temperature.