Electrical pump-and-probe study of spin singlet-triplet relaxation in a quantum dot

Phys Rev Lett. 2005 Jul 29;95(5):056803. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.056803. Epub 2005 Jul 28.

Abstract

Spin relaxation from a triplet excited state to a singlet ground state in a semiconductor quantum dot is studied by employing an electrical pump-and-probe method. Spin relaxation occurs via co-tunneling when the tunneling rate is relatively large, confirmed by a characteristic square dependence of the relaxation rate on the tunneling rate. When co-tunneling is suppressed by reducing the tunneling rate, the intrinsic spin relaxation is dominated by spin-orbit interaction. We discuss a selection rule of the spin-orbit interaction based on the observed double-exponential decay of the triplet state.