Coherent spin dynamics of electrons and excitons in nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in understanding the coherent spin dynamics of electrons and excitons in nanostructures, focusing on spin control, detection, and the microscopic mechanisms involved in semiconductor systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of experimental and theoretical studies on spin phenomena in low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, emphasizing pump-probe techniques and spin orientation mechanisms.

Findings

Microscopic mechanisms of spin orientation identified

Comparison of theory and experiment on quantum wells and dots

Insights into spin signal formation via optical pulses

Abstract

The studies of spin phenomena in semiconductor low dimensional systems have grown into the rapidly developing area of the condensed matter physics: spintronics. The most urgent problems in this area, both fundamental and applied, are the creation of charge carrier spin polarization and its detection as well as electron spin control by nonmagnetic methods. Here we present a review of recent achievements in the studies of spin dynamics of electrons, holes and their complexes in the pump-probe method. The microscopic mechanisms of spin orientation of charge carriers and their complexes by short circularly polarized optical pulses and the formation processes of the spin signals of Faraday and Kerr rotation of the probe pulse polarization plane as well as induced ellipticity are discussed. A special attention is paid to the comparison of theoretical concepts with experimental data obtained on the n-type quantum well and quantum dot array samples.