Electrical control of phonon-mediated spin relaxation rate in semiconductor quantum dots: Rashba versus Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

In symmetric quantum dots (QDs), it is well known that the spin hot spot (i.e., the cusplike structure due to the presence of degeneracy near the level or anticrossing point) is present for the pure Rashba case but is absent for the pure Dresselhaus case [Bulaev and Loss, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 076805 (2005)]. Since the Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling dominates over the Rashba spin-orbit coupling in GaAs and GaSb QDs, it is important to find the exact location of the spin hot spot or the cusplike structure even for the pure Dresselhaus case. In this paper, we present analytical and numerical results that show that the spin hot spot can also be seen for the pure Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling case by inducing large anisotropy through external gates. At or nearby the spin hot spot, the spin transition rate increases and the decoherence time decreases by several orders of magnitude compared to the case with no spin hot spot. Thus one should avoid such locations when designing QD spin based transistors for possible implementation in quantum logic gates, solid-state quantum computing, and quantum information processing. It is also possible to extract the exact experimental data [Amasha, MacLean, Radu, Zumb\"uhl, Kastner, Hanson, and Gossard, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 046803 (2008] for the phonon mediated spin-flip rates from our developed theoretical model.