Element-sensitive measurement of the hole-nuclear spin interaction in quantum dots

Abstract

It has been proposed that valence-band holes can form robust spin qubits owing to their weaker hyperfine coupling compared with electrons. However, it was demonstrated recently that the hole hyperfine interaction is not negligible, although a consistent picture of the mechanism controlling its magnitude is still lacking. Here we address this problem by measuring the hole hyperfine constant independently for each chemical element in InGaAs/GaAs, InP/GaInP and GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots. Contrary to existing models we find that the hole hyperfine constant has opposite signs for cations and anions and ranges from -15% to +15% relative to that for electrons. We attribute such changes to the competing positive contributions of p-symmetry atomic orbitals and the negative contributions of d-orbitals. These findings yield information on the orbital composition of the valence band 12 and enable a fundamentally new approach for verification of computed Bloch wavefunctions in semiconductor nanostructures 13 . Furthermore, we show that the contribution of cationic d-orbitals leads to a new mechanism of hole spin decoherence. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.