Abstract
Traditional spintronics relies on the spin transport by charge carriers, such as electrons in semiconductor crystals. This brings several complications: the Pauli principle prevents the carriers from moving with the same speed, Coulomb repulsion leads to rapid dephasing of electron flows. Spin-optronics is a valuable alternative to the traditional spintronics. In spin-optronic devices the spin currents are carried by electrically neutral bosonic quasi-particles: excitons or exciton-polaritons. They can form highly coherent quantum liquids and carry spins over macroscopic distances. The price to pay is a finite and usually very short life-time of the bosonic spin carriers, which breaks the flow conservation rule. In this chapter we present the theory of exciton spin transport which may be applied to a range of systems where remarkable observations of bosonic spin transport have been reported, in particular, to indirect excitons in coupled GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells and exciton polaritons in planar microcavities. We describe the effect of spin-orbit interaction of electrons and holes on the exciton spin, account for the Zeeman effect induced by external magnetic fields, long range and short range exchange splittings of the exciton resonances. We also consider the exciton transport in the non-linear regime and discuss the definitions of exciton spin current, polarization current and spin conductivity. We address the perspective of observation of dissipationless exciton spin currents sometimes referred to as “spin superfluidity”.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the Royal Society Leverhulme fellowship. The author is deeply grateful to L.V. Butov, T. Ostatnicky, Y.G. Rubo, M.R. Vladimirova, M.M. Glazov, I.A. Shelykh, T.C.H. Liew, A. Bramati for many useful discussions on the peculiarities of bosonic spin transport.
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Kavokin, A. (2013). Bosonic Spin Transport. In: Bramati, A., Modugno, M. (eds) Physics of Quantum Fluids. Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences, vol 177. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37569-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37569-9_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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