Narrow Results

Nuclear clusters are intricately linked to astrophysical processes involving light nuclei. Here, several examples of the role played in the evolution of the universe by these exotic structures in light nuclei are given, concluding with an outlook for future direct measurements.

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.