corner
corner
APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. B » Volume 78 » Issue 16
< Previous Article | Next Article >

Phys. Rev. B 78, 165321 (2008) [10 pages]

Hole spin relaxation in p-type GaAs quantum wires investigated by numerically solving fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equations

Download: PDF (199 kB) Buy this article Export: BibTeX or EndNote (RIS)

C. Lü1,2, U. Zülicke3, and M. W. Wu1,2,*
1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
2Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
3Institute of Fundamental Sciences and MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Massey University, Private Bag 11 222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Received 8 August 2008; revised 22 September 2008; published 23 October 2008

We investigate the spin relaxation of p-type GaAs quantum wires by numerically solving the fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equations. We find that the quantum-wire size influences the spin-relaxation time effectively by modulating the energy spectrum and the heavy-hole–light-hole mixing of wire states. The effects of quantum-wire size, temperature, hole density, and initial polarization are investigated in detail. We show that, depending on the situation, the spin-relaxation time can either increase or decrease with hole density. Due to the different subband structure and effects arising from spin-orbit coupling, many spin-relaxation properties are quite different from those of holes in the bulk or in quantum wells, and the intersubband scattering makes a marked contribution to the spin relaxation.

© 2008 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.78.165321
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.78.165321
PACS:
72.25.Rb, 73.21.Hb, 71.10.−w

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; mwwu@ustc.edu.cn.

 
< Previous Article | Next Article >