A principal motivation to develop graphene for future devices has been its promise for quantum spintronics. Hyperfine and spin-orbit interactions are expected to be negligible in single-layer graphene. Spin transport experiments, on the other hand, show that graphene's spin relaxation is orders of magnitude faster than predicted. We present a quantum interference measurement that disentangles sources of magnetic and non-magnetic decoherence in graphene. Magnetic defects are shown to be the primary cause of spin relaxation, while spin-orbit interaction is undetectably small.
@article{arxiv.1211.1417,
title = {Defect-mediated spin relaxation and dephasing in graphene},
author = {Mark B. Lundeberg and Rui Yang and Julien Renard and Joshua A. Folk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.1417},
year = {2013}
}