Abstract
Spin quantum beat spectroscopy is employed to investigate the in-plane anisotropy of the spin dynamics in (001) GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells induced by an external electric field. This technique allows the anisotropy of the spin relaxation rate ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}^{s}$ and the electron Land\'e $g$ factor ${g}^{*}$ to be measured simultaneously. The measurements are compared to similar data from (001) GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells with applied shear strain and asymmetric barrier growth. All of these operations act to reduce the symmetry compared to that of a symmetric (001) quantum well in an identical manner (D${}_{2d}$ $\ensuremath{\rightarrow}$ C${}_{2v}$). However, by looking at the anisotropy of both ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}^{s}$ and ${g}^{*}$ simultaneously we show that the microscopic actions of these symmetry breaking operations are very different. The experiments attest that although symmetry arguments are a very useful tool to identify the allowed spin dependent properties of a material system, only a microscopic approach reveals if allowed anisotropies will manifest.
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