Abstract
We consider an exchange model of itinerant electrons in a Heisenberg ferromagnet and we assume that the ferromagnet is in a fully polarized state. Using the Holstein-Primakoff transformation we are able to obtain a boson-fermion Hamiltonian that is well known in the interaction between light and matter. This model describes the spontaneous emission in two-level atoms that is the proper decoherence mechanism when the number of modes of the radiation field is taken increasingly large, the vacuum acting as a reservoir. In the same way one can see that the interaction between the bosonic modes of spin waves and an itinerant electron produces decoherence by spin flipping with a rate proportional to the size of the system. In this way we are able to show that the experiments on quantum dots, described by D. P. Pivin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 4687 (1999)], and nanowires, described in D. Natelson et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 1821 (2001)], can be understood as the interaction of itinerant electrons and an electron gas in a fully polarized state.
- Received 19 August 2003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.68.193413
©2003 American Physical Society