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Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Impact of electron-impurity scattering on the spin relaxation time in graphene: a first-principles study
Dmitry V Fedorov1, Martin Gradhand2, Sergey Ostanin3
1Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Weinberg 2, 06120 Halle, Germany and Institute of Physics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, 06099 Halle, Germany.
Abstract:
The effect of electron-impurity scattering on momentum and spin relaxation times in graphene is studied by means of relativistic ab initio calculations. Assuming carbon and silicon adatoms as natural impurities in graphene, we are able to simulate fast spin relaxation observed experimentally. We investigate the dependence of the relaxation times on the impurity position and demonstrate that C or Si adatoms act as real-space spin hot spots inducing spin-flip rates about 5 orders of magnitude larger than those of in-plane impurities. This fact confirms the hypothesis that the adatom-induced spin-orbit coupling leads to fast spin relaxation in graphene.
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