Spin relaxation in GaAs quantum dots

The spin-relaxation time due to the electron-acoustic phonon scattering in GaAs quantum dots is studied after the exact diagonalization of the electron Hamiltonian with the spin-orbit coupling. Different effects such as the magnetic field, the quantum dot size, and the temperature on the spin-relaxation time are investigated in detail. Moreover, we show that the perturbation method widely used in the literature is inadequate in accounting for the electron structure and therefore the spin-relaxation time.