Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HL: Fachverband Halbleiterphysik

HL 7: Spintronics I (joined session with TT)

HL 7.2: Talk

Monday, March 20, 2017, 09:45–10:00, POT 151

Coherent electron Zitterbewegung triggered by ps optical pulses — •Manfred Ersfeld¹, Ivan Stepanov¹, Alexander V. Poshakinskiy², Mihail Lepsa³, Eugeneous L. Ivchenko², Sergey A. Tarasenko², and Bernd Beschoten¹ — ¹2nd Institute of Physics and JARA-FIT, RWTH Aachen University, D-52074 Aachen, Germany — ²Ioffe Institute, 194021 St Petersburg, Russia — ³Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-9), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany

Zitterbewegung is a direct consequence of relativistic quantum mechanics which predicts that free Dirac electrons exhibit a rapid trembling motion even in the absence of external forces. Recent theoretical studies have shown that electrons in III-V semiconductors also exhibit Zitterbewegung caused by the spin orbit interaction. Here we probe the Zitterbewegung of electrons in n-type InGaAs as an AC electric current. We trigger the coherent electron Zitterbewegung by optical initialization of an ensemble of electron spins in the same spin states and control the frequency of electron oscillations in real space by tuning the Larmor spin precession frequency in an external magnetic field.