Matthew Hodgson

Spin Relaxation in GaAs: Importance of Electron-Electron Interactions

We study spin relaxation in n-type bulk GaAs, due to the Dyakonov–Perel mechanism, using ensemble Monte Carlo methods. Our results confirm that spin relaxation time increases with the electronic density in the regime of moderate electronic concentrations and high temperature. We show that the electron-electron scattering in the non-degenerate regime significantly slows down spin relaxation. This result supports predictions by Glazov and Ivchenko. Most importantly, our findings highlight the importance of many-body interactions for spin dynamics: we show that only by properly taking into account electron-electron interactions within the simulations, results for the spin relaxation time—with respect to both electron density and temperature—will reach good quantitative agreement with corresponding experimental data. Our calculations contain no fitting parameters.

Role of electron localization in density functionals

We introduce a new functional for simulating ground-state and time-dependent electronic systems within density-functional theory. The functional combines an expression for the exact Kohn-Sham (KS) potential in the limit of complete electron localization with a measure of the actual localization. We find accurate self-consistent charge densities, even for systems where the exact exchange-correlation potential exhibits non-local dependence on the density, such as potential steps. We compare our results to the exact KS potential for each system. The self-interaction correction is accurately described, avoiding the need for orbital-dependent potentials.

Local density approximations from finite systems

The local density approximation (LDA) constructed through quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the homogeneous electron gas (HEG) is the most common approximation to the exchange-correlation functional in density functional theory. We introduce an alternative set of LDAs constructed from slablike systems of one, two, and three electrons that resemble the HEG within a finite region, and illustrate the concept in one dimension. Comparing with the exact densities and Kohn-Sham potentials for various test systems, we find that the LDAs give a good account of the self-interaction correction, but are less reliable when correlation is stronger or currents flow.

Spin decoherence in n-type GaAs: The effectiveness of the third-body rejection method for electron-electron scattering

We study the spin decoherence in n-type bulk GaAs for moderate electronic densities at room temperature using Ensemble Monte Carlo method. We demonstrate that the third-body rejection method devised by Ridley can be successfully adapted to Ensemble Monte Carlo algorithm, and used to tackle the problem of the electron-electron contribution to spin decoherence.