Room-temperature electron spin polarization exceeding 90% in an opto-spintronic semiconductor nanostructure via remote spin filtering

An exclusive advantage of semiconductor spintronics is its potential for opto-spintronics, which will allow integration of spin-based information processing/storage with photon-based information transfer/communications. Unfortunately, progress has so far been severely hampered by the failure to generate nearly fully spin-polarized charge carriers in semiconductors at room temperature. Here we demonstrate successful generation of conduction electron spin polarization exceeding 90% at room temperature without a magnetic field in a non-magnetic all-semiconductor nanostructure, which remains high even up to 110 °C. This is accomplished by remote spin filtering of InAs quantum-dot electrons via an adjacent tunnelling-coupled GaNAs spin filter. We further show that the quantum-dot electron spin can be remotely manipulated by spin control in the adjacent spin filter, paving the way for remote spin encoding and writing of quantum memory as well as for remote spin control of spin–photon interfaces. This work demonstrates the feasibility to implement opto-spintronic functionality in common semiconductor nanostructures.