Electric-Field Control of a Hydrogenic Donor’s Spin in a Semiconductor

An ac electric field applied to a single donor-bound electron in a semiconductor modulates the orbital character of its wave function, which affects the electron’s spin dynamics via the spin-orbit interaction. Numerical calculations of the spin dynamics of a single hydrogenic donor (Si) embedded in GaAs, using a real-space multiband k·p formalism, show the high symmetry of the hydrogenic donor state results in strongly nonlinear dependences of the electronic g tensor on applied fields. A nontrivial consequence is that the most rapid Rabi oscillations occur for electric fields modulated at a subharmonic of the Larmor frequency.