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Summary: Spin lifetime in silicon in the presence of parasitic electronic effects
Biqin Huanga
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716
Douwe J. Monsma
Cambridge NanoTech Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Ian Appelbaum
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716
Received 27 April 2007; accepted 10 May 2007; published online 3 July 2007
A hybrid ferromagnet/semiconductor device is used to determine a lower bound on the spin lifetime
for conduction electrons in silicon. We use spin precession to self-consistently measure the drift
velocity versus drift field of spin-polarized electrons, and use this electronic control to change the
transit time between electron injection and detection. A measurement of normalized magnetocurrent
as a function of drift velocity is used with a simple exponential-decay model to argue that the value
obtained 2 ns is artificially lowered by electronic effects and could potentially be orders of
magnitude higher. © 2007 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.2750411
I. INTRODUCTION
Manipulation of electron spin injection, transport, and
detection in semiconductors promises to form the basis of the
future's lower-power, higher-speed information-processing
paradigm. Much work over the past decade has elucidated
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