Excitonic spin relaxation in GaN

Abstract

By performing non-degenerate pump-probe experiments, we study the relaxation dynamics of spin-polarized A and B excitons in wurtzite epitaxial GaN. We show that the spin relaxation of the exciton as a whole is negligible with regard to the spin relaxation of the individual carriers. We determined ps for the electron in the conduction band, ps, and ps for the heavy hole (HH) and for the light hole (LH), respectively. The quite long HH relaxation time can be related to the band structure in which the degeneracy between different spin-valence bands is lifted.