Optoelectronic spin memories of electrons in semiconductors

We optically generate electron spins in semiconductors and apply an external magnetic field perpendicularly to them. Time-resolved photoluminescence measurements, pumped with a circularly polarized light, are performed to study the spin polarization and spin memory times in the semiconducting host. The measured spin polarization is found to be an exponential decay with the time delay of the probe. It is also found that the spin memory times, extracted from the polarization decays, enhance with the strength of the external magnetic field. However, at higher fields, the memory times get saturated to sub-μs because of the coupling for interacting electrons with the local nuclear field.