Defect-enabled Room-temperature Spin Functionality in Ga(In)NAs

• Efficient generation, maintaining, manipulation and detection of electron spin polarization and coherence at room-temperature (RT) in semiconductors is a prerequisite for the success of future semiconductor spintronics. Potential spintronic devices are expected to be based on fundamental building blocks such as spin filters (or spin injectors or spin aligners), spin amplifiers and spin detectors. During the past decade spin filters and spin detectors have been a main focal point of intense research efforts in the field of semiconductor spintronics that have led to many innovative approaches and encouraging developments. In contrast, experimental developments in spin amplifiers have been extremely limited. At present, realization of efficient RT spin functionality remains to be a great challenge and a hotly pursued research topic.In this work, we explore a new and unconventional approach of defect-enabled spin functionality in a non-magnetic semiconductor without requiring a magnetic layer or external magnetic fields. We demonstrated efficient defect-engineered spin filtering in Ga(In)NAs, which is capable of generating a remarkably high spin polarization degree (> 40%) of conduction electrons at RT. The highest spin polarization achieved to date by using this approach is up to 90 %. We also proposed a conceptually new spin amplifier by defect engineering and provided the first experimental demonstration of an efficient RT spin amplifier based on Ga(In)NAs with a spin gain up to 2700%! Such a spin amplifier is shown to be capable of amplifying a fast-modulating input spin signal while truthfully maintaining its time variation of the spin-encoded information, and is predicted to remain functional up to 1 GHz. By taking advantage of the spin amplification effect, we further showed that Ga(In)NAs can be employed as an efficient RT spin detector, with spin detection efficiency well exceeding 100%. Applications of such a spin-functional semiconductor material could potentially provide an attractive and viable solution to the current and important issues on RT spin injection, spin amplification and spin detection in semiconductors for future spintronics.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Den kondenserade materiens fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Condensed Matter Physics (hsv//eng)

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