HOLE SPIN RELAXATION IN SEMICONDUCTOR QUANTUM-WELLS

We investigate theoretically the <<spin>>-flip and <<spin>>-conserving processes for holes in single quantum wells. The presence of a spatia l asymmetry in the hole envelope function Hamiltonian or the small lin ear-in-Absolute value of k perturbation lifts the parity degeneracy of the Luttinger dispersions of the symmetric quantum well. We show that in this case a D'Yakonov and Perel-like mechanism holds for the relax ation of the hole <<spin>>.