A semi-classical treatment of spin relaxation in direct-gap compound semiconductors due to scattering by edge dislocations from both charged cores, and the strain fields surrounding them was presented. The results indicated a deleterious effect on spin transport in narrow band-gap III-V semiconductors due to dislocation scattering. However, this form of scattering was found to be surprisingly benign for wide-bandgap semiconductors with small spin-orbit coupling (such as GaN). This observation leads to a proposal for possible lattice-mismatched hybrid heterostructure devices that take advantage of the long spin lifetimes of the wide-bandgap semiconductors for transporting spin over large distances acting as spin-interconnects, and the wide tunability of spin in the narrow-bandgap semiconductors for spin logic operations.

Spin Scattering by Dislocations in III-V Semiconductors. D.Jena: Physical Review B, 2004, 70[24], 245203 (8pp)