Interaction correction to the conductivity of two-dimensional electron gas in In$_x$Ga$_{1-x}$As/InP quantum well structure with strong spin-orbit coupling

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates the electron-electron interaction correction to conductivity in InGaAs/InP quantum wells with strong spin-orbit coupling, revealing that spin relaxation does not suppress the interaction correction as theoretically expected.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental analysis showing that spin relaxation does not diminish the interaction correction in systems with strong spin-orbit coupling.

Findings

Spin relaxation does not suppress the interaction correction.

The diffusion part of the interaction correction is reliably obtained.

Contrary to theoretical predictions, fast spin relaxation does not enhance the correction.

Abstract

The electron-electron interaction quantum correction to the conductivity of the gated single quantum well InP/In$_{0.53}$Ga$_{0.47}$As heterostructures is investigated experimentally. The analysis of the temperature and magnetic field dependences of the conductivity tensor allows us to obtain reliably the diffusion part of the interaction correction for different values of spin relaxation rate, $1/\tau_s$. The surprising result is that the spin relaxation processes do not suppress the interaction correction in the triplet channel and, thus, do not enhance the correction in magnitude contrary to theoretical expectations even in the case of relatively fast spin relaxation, $1/T\tau_s\simeq (20-25)\gg 1$.