Electron spin relaxation in $p$-type GaAs quantum wells

Abstract

We investigate electron spin relaxation in $p$-type GaAs quantum wells from a fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach, with all the relevant scatterings, such as the electron-impurity, electron-phonon, electron-electron Coulomb, electron-hole Coulomb and electron-hole exchange (the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism) scatterings explicitly included. From this approach, we examine the relative importance of the D'yakonov-Perel' and Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanisms in wide ranges of temperature, hole density, excitation density and impurity density, and present a phase-diagram--like picture showing the parameter regime where the D'yakonov-Perel' or Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism is more important. By including more hole subbands and bands in our model, we are able to study spin dynamics at high hole density. It is shown that the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism can surpass the D'yakonov-Perel' mechanism in some temperature regime with sufficiently high hole density for various impurity and excitation densities. We also discover that in the impurity-free case the temperature regime where the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism is more efficient than the D'yakonov-Perel' one is around the hole Fermi temperature for high hole density, regardless of excitation density. However, in the high impurity density case with the impurity density being identical to the hole density, this regime is roughly from the electron Fermi temperature to the hole Fermi temperature. Particularly, the Bir-Aronov-Pikus mechanism can dominate the spin relaxation in the {\em whole} temperature regime of the investigation (from 5 K to 300 K) in the case with high impurity and very low excitation densities, since the electron (hole) Fermi temperature is... (The remaining is omitted due to the limit of the space)