Spin relaxation due to random Rashba spin-orbit coupling in GaAs (110) quantum wells

Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China - Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China

Corresponding author: mwwu@ustc.edu.cn

Received: 1 December 2009
Accepted: 17 February 2010

Abstract

We investigate the spin relaxation due to the random Rashba spin-orbit coupling in symmetric GaAs (110) quantum wells from the fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach. All relevant scatterings, such as the electron-impurity, electron–longitudinal-optical-phonon, electron–acoustic-phonon, as well as electron-electron Coulomb scatterings are explicitly included. It is shown that our calculation reproduces the experimental data by Müller et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 101 (2008) 206601) for a reasonable choice of parameter values. We also predict that the temperature dependence of the spin relaxation time presents a peak in the case with low impurity density, which originates from the electron-electron Coulomb scattering.