Electron spin relaxation in graphene from a microscopic approach: Role of electron-electron interaction

Abstract

Electron spin relaxation in graphene on a substrate is investigated from the microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equation approach. All the relevant scatterings, such as the electron impurity, electron-acoustic phonon, electron-optical phonon, electron-remote-interfacial phonon, as well as electron-electron Coulomb scatterings, are explicitly included. Our study concentrates on clean intrinsic graphene, where the spin-orbit coupling from the adatoms can be neglected. We discuss the effect of the electron-electron Coulomb interaction on spin relaxation under various conditions. It is shown that the electron-electron Coulomb scattering plays an important role in spin relaxation at high temperature. We also find a significant increase in the spin relaxation time for high spin polarization even at room temperature, which is due to the Coulomb Hartree-Fock contribution-induced effective longitudinal magnetic field. It is also discovered that the spin relaxation time increases with the in-plane electric field due to the hot-electron effect, which is different from the nonmonotonic behavior in semiconductors. Moreover, we show that the electron-electron Coulomb scattering in graphene is not strong enough to establish the steady-state hot-electron distribution widely used in the literature and an alternative approximate one is proposed based on our computation.