Theory of dynamic nuclear polarization and feedback in quantum dots

Abstract

An electron confined in a quantum dot interacts with its local nuclear spin environment through the hyperfine contact interaction. This interaction combined with external control and relaxation or measurement of the electron spin allows for the generation of dynamic nuclear polarization. The quantum nature of the nuclear bath, along with the interplay of coherent external fields and incoherent dynamics in these systems renders a wealth of intriguing phenomena seen in recent experiments such as electron Zeeman frequency focusing, hysteresis, and line dragging. We develop in detail a fully quantum, self-consistent theory that can be applied to such experiments and that moreover has predictive power. Our theory uses the operator sum representation formalism in order to incorporate the incoherent dynamics caused by the additional, Markovian bath, which in self-assembled dots is the vacuum field responsible for electron-hole optical recombination. The beauty of this formalism is that it reduces the complexity of the problem by encoding the joint dynamics of the external coherent and incoherent driving in an effective dynamical map that only acts on the electron spin subspace. This together with the separation of timescales in the problem allows for a tractable and analytically solvable formalism. The key role of entanglement between the electron spin and the nuclear spins in the formation of dynamic nuclear polarization naturally follows from our solution. We demonstrate the theory in detail for an optical pulsed experiment and present an in-depth discussion and physical explanation of our results.