Spin-phonon relaxation from a universal ab initio density-matrix approach

Junqing Xu, Adela Habib, Sushant Kumar, Feng Wu, Ravishankar Sundararaman () and Yuan Ping ()
Additional contact information
Junqing Xu: University of California
Adela Habib: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Sushant Kumar: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Feng Wu: University of California
Ravishankar Sundararaman: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Yuan Ping: University of California

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Designing new quantum materials with long-lived electron spin states urgently requires a general theoretical formalism and computational technique to reliably predict intrinsic spin relaxation times. We present a new, accurate and universal first-principles methodology based on Lindbladian dynamics of density matrices to calculate spin-phonon relaxation time of solids with arbitrary spin mixing and crystal symmetry. This method describes contributions of Elliott-Yafet and D’yakonov-Perel’ mechanisms to spin relaxation for systems with and without inversion symmetry on an equal footing. We show that intrinsic spin and momentum relaxation times both decrease with increasing temperature; however, for the D’yakonov-Perel’ mechanism, spin relaxation time varies inversely with extrinsic scattering time. We predict large anisotropy of spin lifetime in transition metal dichalcogenides. The excellent agreement with experiments for a broad range of materials underscores the predictive capability of our method for properties critical to quantum information science.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16063-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-16063-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16063-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().