Electron-electron Scattering in the Diffusive Regime and Dyakonov-Perel Theory: a case study of spin decoherence in n-type GaAs

Abstract

We argue that in the ensemble Monte Carlo approach, the spin decoherence caused by electron-electron interactions in n-type bulk GaAs at room temperature, according to Dyakonov-Perel theory, is mainly induced by the electron density while electron-electron scattering itself does not directly affect spin lifetime but instead influences it through any energy dependence of other scattering mechanisms as typically expected in the case of the electron mobility. Therefore, our analysis, which is strongly supported by Bayesian Occam's razor, reconciles the semiclassical Monte Carlo approach with the novel computational first-principles tool recently proposed by Xu, Habib, Sundararaman and Ping.