Spin Relaxation in GaAs: Importance of Electron-Electron Interactions

We study spin relaxation in n-type bulk GaAs, due to the Dyakonov–Perel mechanism, using ensemble Monte Carlo methods. Our results confirm that spin relaxation time increases with the electronic density in the regime of moderate electronic concentrations and high temperature. We show that the electron-electron scattering in the non-degenerate regime significantly slows down spin relaxation. This result supports predictions by Glazov and Ivchenko. Most importantly, our findings highlight the importance of many-body interactions for spin dynamics: we show that only by properly taking into account electron-electron interactions within the simulations, results for the spin relaxation time—with respect to both electron density and temperature—will reach good quantitative agreement with corresponding experimental data. Our calculations contain no fitting parameters.