Optical injection of spin-polarized carriers across a strongly mismatched heterostructure

We observed an effective injection of spin-polarized carriers from II–VI Zn0.97Mn0.03Te diluted magnetic semiconductor spin aligning layer into III–V-based, GaAs-based quantum well structure. By using circular polarized excitation and detection, we demonstrate that the injection of spin-polarized carriers indeed proceeds through the II–VI/III–V interface in spite of a huge lattice mismatch (∼7.8%) which is decorated by a great number of dislocations. This indicates that spins are quite robust and maintain their polarization memory even after passing through a dense array of misfit dislocations.