BALLISTIC CARRIER TRANSPORT IN SEMICONDUCTORS STUDIED BY ULTRAFAST LASER TECHNIQUES

Abstract Exploring the spin degree of freedom of electrons has been recognized as a promising solution to several limitations in semiconductor device industry. Injection, transport, detection and manipulation of "spin" in materials are the key elements of this new electronic technology, known as spintronics. Despite the extensive efforts in recent years, there are still significant challenges and spintronics is still in the research phase. This dissertation is devoted to study one of these key processes: spin transport. We used quantum interference and control technique to inject spin currents. Two techniques are developed to detect the spin transport, namely a pump probe technique and a second-harmonic generation technique. Spin transport in several materials and structures are studied, including GaAs bulk, quantum wells, and germanium wafers. We observed the intrinsic inverse spin-Hall effect by time-resolving the ballistic spin and charge transport. We found that the Hall current appeared before the first scattering event. We discovered a new nonlinear optical effect, second-harmonic generation, induced by the pure spin current, and demonstrated that it can be used to directly detect pure spin currents. We have also discovered a charge-current-induced second-harmonic generation process, and used it to study plasma oscillation in GaAs. Finally, we also attempted to observe the second harmonic generation induced by spin polarized and spin unpolarized carrier populations. We did not observe a significant change in the observed second harmonic generation induced by spin polarized and spin unpolarized carrier populations

Spintronics: Fundamentals and applications

Spintronics, or spin electronics, involves the study of active control and manipulation of spin degrees of freedom in solid-state systems. This article reviews the current status of this subject, including both recent advances and well-established results. The primary focus is on the basic physical principles underlying the generation of carrier spin polarization, spin dynamics, and spin-polarized transport in semiconductors and metals. Spin transport differs from charge transport in that spin is a nonconserved quantity in solids due to spin-orbit and hyperfine coupling. The authors discuss in detail spin decoherence mechanisms in metals and semiconductors. Various theories of spin injection and spin-polarized transport are applied to hybrid structures relevant to spin-based devices and fundamental studies of materials properties. Experimental work is reviewed with the emphasis on projected applications, in which external electric and magnetic fields and illumination by light will be used to control spin and charge dynamics to create new functionalities not feasible or ineffective with conventional electronics.Comment: invited review, 36 figures, 900+ references; minor stylistic changes from the published versio

Nanoengineering of organic light-emitting diodes.

This thesis reports nanoengineerging of the emission and transport properties of organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This is achieved by a control of the electronic material properties and the photonic device properties. A novel class of conjugated materials for electroluminescence (EL) applications is presented, based on successively branching, or dendritic, materials comprising an emissive core and a shielding dendritic architecture. Exciton localisation at the centre of these dendrimers is observed in both luminescence and absorption. A detailed quantum chemical investigation using an exciton model supports these findings and accurately describes the energies and oscillator strengths of transitions in the core and branches. The dendrimer generation describes the degree of branching and gives a direct measure of the separation and interaction between chromophores. Increasing generation is found to lead to a reduction in red tail emission. This correlates with an increase in operating field and LED efficiency. Dendrimer blends with triplet harvesting dendritic phosphors are also investigated and found to exhibit unique emission properties. A numerical device model is presented, which is used to describe the temperature dependence of single layer polymer LEDs by fitting the field-dependent mobility and the barrier to hole injection. The device model is also used to obtain mobility values for the dendrimer materials, which are in excellent agreement with results obtained from time-of-flight measurements. The dendrimer generation is shown to provide a direct control of hopping mobility, which decreases by two orders of magnitude as the dendrimer generation increases from 0 to 3. The photonic properties and spontaneous emission of an LED are modified by incorporating a periodic wavelength scale microstructure into the emitting film. This is found to double the amount of light emitted with no effect on the device current. An investigation of the angular dependence and the polarisation of the emission shows that the increase in efficiency is due to the scattering out of lossy waveguide modes in the organic film. (author)SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042765 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Semiconductor Spintronics

Spintronics refers commonly to phenomena in which the spin of electrons in a solid state environment plays the determining role. In a more narrow sense spintronics is an emerging research field of electronics: spintronics devices are based on a spin control of electronics, or on an electrical and optical control of spin or magnetism. This review presents selected themes of semiconductor spintronics, introducing important concepts in spin transport, spin injection, Silsbee-Johnson spin-charge coupling, and spindependent tunneling, as well as spin relaxation and spin dynamics. The most fundamental spin-dependent nteraction in nonmagnetic semiconductors is spin-orbit coupling. Depending on the crystal symmetries of the material, as well as on the structural properties of semiconductor based heterostructures, the spin-orbit coupling takes on different functional forms, giving a nice playground of effective spin-orbit Hamiltonians. The effective Hamiltonians for the most relevant classes of materials and heterostructures are derived here from realistic electronic band structure descriptions. Most semiconductor device systems are still theoretical concepts, waiting for experimental demonstrations. A review of selected proposed, and a few demonstrated devices is presented, with detailed description of two important classes: magnetic resonant tunnel structures and bipolar magnetic diodes and transistors. In most cases the presentation is of tutorial style, introducing the essential theoretical formalism at an accessible level, with case-study-like illustrations of actual experimental results, as well as with brief reviews of relevant recent achievements in the field.Comment: tutorial review; 342 pages, 132 figure

The optical pumping of alkali atoms using coherent radiation from semi-conductor injection lasers and incoherent radiation from resonance lamps

An experimental study for creating population differences in the ground states of alkali atoms (Cesium 133) is presented. Studies made on GaAs-junction lasers and the achievement of population inversions among the hyperfine levels in the ground state of Cs 133 by optically pumping it with radiation from a GaAs diode laser. Laser output was used to monitor the populations in the ground state hyperfine levels as well as to perform the hyperfine pumping. A GaAs laser operated at about 77 K was used to scan the 8521 A line of Cs 133. Experiments were performed both with neon-filled and with paraflint-coated cells containing the cesium vapor. Investigations were also made for the development of the triple resonance coherent pulse technique and for the detection of microwave induced hyperfine trasistions by destroying the phase relationships produced by a radio frequency pulse. A pulsed cesium resonance lamp developed, and the lamp showed clean and reproducible switching characteristics

Spin-dependent phenomena and device concepts explored in (Ga,Mn)As

Over the past two decades, the research of (Ga,Mn)As has led to a deeper understanding of relativistic spin-dependent phenomena in magnetic systems. It has also led to discoveries of new effects and demonstrations of unprecedented functionalities of experimental spintronic devices with general applicability to a wide range of materials. In this article we review the basic material properties that make (Ga,Mn)As a favorable test-bed system for spintronics research and discuss contributions of (Ga,Mn)As studies in the general context of the spin-dependent phenomena and device concepts. Special focus is on the spin-orbit coupling induced effects and the reviewed topics include the interaction of spin with electrical current, light, and heat.Comment: 47 pages, 41 figure

Spin dynamics in semiconductors

This article reviews the current status of spin dynamics in semiconductors which has achieved a lot of progress in the past years due to the fast growing field of semiconductor spintronics. The primary focus is the theoretical and experimental developments of spin relaxation and dephasing in both spin precession in time domain and spin diffusion and transport in spacial domain. A fully microscopic many-body investigation on spin dynamics based on the kinetic spin Bloch equation approach is reviewed comprehensively.Comment: a review article with 193 pages and 1103 references. To be published in Physics Reports