Spin-phonon relaxation times in centrosymmetric materials from first principles
- Creators
- Park, Jinsoo
- Zhou, Jin-Jian
- Bernardi, Marco
Abstract
We present a first-principles approach for computing the phonon-limited T₁ spin relaxation time due to the Elliott-Yafet mechanism. Our scheme combines fully relativistic spin-flip electron-phonon interactions with an approach to compute the effective spin of band electrons in materials with inversion symmetry. We apply our method to silicon and diamond, for which we compute the temperature dependence of the spin relaxation times and analyze the contributions to spin relaxation from different phonons and valley processes. The computed spin relaxation times in silicon are in excellent agreement with experiment in the 50–300 K temperature range. In diamond, we predict intrinsic spin relaxation times of 540 μs at 77 K and 2.3 μs at 300 K. We show that the spin-flip and momentum relaxation mechanisms are governed by distinct microscopic processes. Our work enables precise predictions of spin-phonon relaxation times in a wide range of materials, providing microscopic insight into spin relaxation and guiding the development of spin-based quantum technologies.
Additional Information
© 2020 American Physical Society. Received 3 June 2019; revised manuscript received 4 November 2019; published 13 January 2020. J.P. thanks Raffaello Bianco and I-Te Lu for fruitful discussions. J.P. acknowledges support by the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. CAREER-1750613, which provided for theory and method development, and No. ACI-1642443, which provided for code development. M.B. was partially supported by the Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-SC0019166.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevB.101.045202.pdf
Submitted - 1906.01109.pdf
Supplemental Material - Supplemental.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- Elliott-Yafet Spin-Phonon Relaxation Times from First Principles
- Eprint ID
- 97659
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190805-135231900
- Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies
- DMR-1750613
- NSF
- ACI-1642443
- NSF
- DE-SC0019166
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- Created
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2019-08-05Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field