Optical injection and detection of ballistic pure spin currents in Ge

Abstract

Ballistic pure spin currents are injected into Ge at 295 K using quantum interference between one and two photon absorption processes for 1786 and 893 nm, 200 fs optical pulses. The spin currents are spatially and temporally detected using polarization- and phase-dependent differential transmission techniques with nanometer spatial and femtosecond temporal resolution. We interpret the dynamics in terms of the fast spin relaxation of the holes and intervalley transfer of electrons.