Hole spin relaxation in $p$-type (111) GaAs quantum wells

TL;DR

This paper investigates hole spin relaxation in (111) GaAs quantum wells, revealing mechanisms for long relaxation times and effects of gate voltage, with implications for spintronic device design.

Contribution

It provides a microscopic analysis of hole spin relaxation mechanisms and predicts extremely long relaxation times in specific quantum well structures.

Findings

Long hole spin relaxation times up to hundreds of nanoseconds predicted.

Pronounced peak in relaxation time as a function of gate voltage due to suppression of inhomogeneous broadening.

Elliott-Yafet mechanism has minimal impact in (111) GaAs/InP quantum wells.

Abstract

Hole spin relaxation in $p$-type (111) GaAs quantum wells is investigated in the case with only the lowest hole subband, which is heavy-hole like in (111) GaAs/AlAs and light-hole like in (111) GaAs/InP quantum wells, being relevant. The subband L\"{o}wdin perturbation method is applied to obtain the effective Hamiltonian including the Dresselhaus and Rashba spin-orbit couplings. Under a proper gate voltage, the total in-plane effective magnetic field in (111) GaAs/AlAs quantum wells can be strongly suppressed in the whole momentum space, while the one in (111) GaAs/InP quantum wells can be suppressed only on a special momentum circle. The hole spin relaxation due to the D'yakonov-Perel' and Elliott-Yafet mechanisms is calculated by means of the fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach with all the relevant scatterings explicitly included. For (111) GaAs/AlAs quantum wells, extremely long heavy-hole spin relaxation time (upto hundreds of nanoseconds) is predicted. In addition, we predict a pronounced peak in the gate-voltage dependence of the heavy-hole spin relaxation time due to the D'yakonov-Perel' mechanism. This peak origins from the suppression of the unique inhomogeneous broadening in (111) GaAs/AlAs quantum wells. Moreover, the Elliott-Yafet mechanism influences the spin relaxation only around the peak area due to the small spin mixing between the heavy and light holes in quantum wells with small well width. We also show the anisotropy of the spin relaxation. In (111) GaAs/InP quantum wells, a mild peak, similar to the case for electrons in (111) GaAs quantum wells, is also predicted in the gate-voltage dependence of the light-hole spin relaxation time. The contribution of the Elliott-Yafet mechanism is always negligible in this case.