Resonant scattering off magnetic impurities in graphene: mechanism for ultrafast spin relaxation

We give a tutorial account of our recently proposed mechanism for spin relaxation based on spin-flip resonant scattering off local magnetic moments. The mechanism is rather general, working in any material with a resonant local moment, but we believe that its particular niche is graphene, whose measured spin relaxation time is 100-1000 ps. Conventional spin-orbit coupling based mechanisms (Elliott-Yafet or Dyakonov-Perel) would require large concentrations (1000 ppm) of impurities to explain this. Our mechanism needs only 1 ppm of resonant local moments, as these act as local spin hot spots: the resonant scatterers do not appear to substantially affect graphene's measured resistivity, but are dominating spin relaxation. In principle, the local moments can come from a variety of sources. Most likely would be organic molecule adsorbants or metallic adatoms. As the representative model, particularly suited for a tutorial, we consider hydrogen adatoms which are theoretically and experimentally demonstrated to yield local magnetic moments when chemisorbed on graphene. We introduce the scattering formalism and apply it to graphene, to obtain the T-matrix and spin-flip scattering rates using the generalized Fermi golden rule