Relaxation and coherent oscillations in the spin dynamics of II-VI diluted magnetic quantum wells

Abstract

We study theoretically the ultrafast spin dynamics of II-VI diluted magnetic quantum wells in the presence of spin-orbit interaction. We extend a recent study where it was shown that the spin-orbit interaction and the exchange sd coupling in bulk and quantum wells can compete resulting in qualitatively new dynamics when they act simultaneously. We concentrate on Hg$_{1-x-y}$Mn$_x$Cd$_y$Te quantum wells, which have a highly tunable Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Our calculations use a recently developed formalism which incorporates electronic correlations originating from the exchange $sd$-coupling. We find that the dependence of electronic spin oscillations on the excess energy changes qualitatively depending on whether or not the spin-orbit interaction dominates or is of comparable strength with the sd interaction.