Electron spin rephasing in $n$-type (001) GaAs quantum wells

K. Shen, M. W. Wu

Published 2012-02-12, updated 2012-04-19Version 2

We investigate the electron spin dephasing in the presence of spin phase recovering by a serried $\pi$-pulse sequence in $n$-type (001) GaAs quantum wells in a wide range of temperature and density regimes. Our numerical calculation is based on the kinetic spin Bloch equation approach with all the relevant scatterings explicitly included. We find that the rephasing pulse sequence with a long inter-pulse spacing only has a marginal influence on the spin lifetime in both the strong and weak scattering limits. We show that the spin lifetime can be significantly increased by reducing the inter-pulse spacing. More interestingly, we show that the temperature and density dependences of the spin lifetime in the case of short inter-pulse spacing coincide with those of the momentum scattering time in the low temperature regime, where nonmonotonic behaviors can appear. The origin of this feature is that the scattering under the quick rephasing manipulation mainly performs as the source of the dephasing channel instead of the key to suppress the inhomogeneous broadening. The contributions of the relevant scattering mechanisms are also discussed.