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Phys. Rev. B 68, 193413 (2003) [4 pages]

Saturation of dephasing time in mesoscopic devices produced by a ferromagnetic state

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Marco Frasca*
Via Erasmo Gattamelata, 3, 00176 Roma, Italy

Received 19 August 2003; revised 17 September 2003; published 24 November 2003

We consider an exchange model of itinerant electrons in a Heisenberg ferromagnet and we assume that the ferromagnet is in a fully polarized state. Using the Holstein-Primakoff transformation we are able to obtain a boson-fermion Hamiltonian that is well known in the interaction between light and matter. This model describes the spontaneous emission in two-level atoms that is the proper decoherence mechanism when the number of modes of the radiation field is taken increasingly large, the vacuum acting as a reservoir. In the same way one can see that the interaction between the bosonic modes of spin waves and an itinerant electron produces decoherence by spin flipping with a rate proportional to the size of the system. In this way we are able to show that the experiments on quantum dots, described by D. P. Pivin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4687 (1999)], and nanowires, described in D. Natelson et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 1821 (2001)], can be understood as the interaction of itinerant electrons and an electron gas in a fully polarized state.

© 2003 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.68.193413
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.68.193413
PACS:
73.23.-b, 75.10.Lp, 75.30.Ds, 03.65.Yz

*Email address: marcofrasca@mclink.it