Abstract
For the ferromagnets iron, cobalt, and nickel we compute the spin-dependent inelastic electronic lifetimes due to carrier-carrier Coulomb interactions including spin-orbit coupling. We find that the spin-dependent density of states at the Fermi energy does not, in general, determine the spin dependence of the lifetimes because of the effective spin-flip transitions allowed by the spin mixing. The majority and minority electron lifetimes computed including spin-orbit coupling for these three ferromagnets do not differ by more than a factor of 2, and agree with experimental results.
- Received 13 March 2014
- Revised 20 October 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.201104
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