We report on an experimental observation of spin noise in a single semiconductor quantum well embedded into a microcavity. The great cavity-enhanced sensitivity to fluctuations of optical anisotropy has allowed us to measure the Kerr rotation and ellipticity noise spectra in the strong-coupling regime. The spin noise spectra clearly show two resonant features: a conventional magnetoresonant component shifting towards higher frequencies with a magnetic field and an unusual “nonmagnetic” component centered at zero frequency and getting suppressed with an increasing magnetic field. We attribute the first of them to the Larmor precession of free electron spins, whereas, the second one is presumably due to hyperfine electron-nuclei spin interactions.

The spin fluctuations of electron and hole doped self-assembled quantum dot ensembles are measured optically in the low-intensity limit of a probe laser for absence and presence of longitudinal or transverse magnetic fields. The experimental results are modeled by two complementary approaches based either on a semiclassical or quantum mechanical description. This allows us to characterize the hyperfine interaction of electron and hole spins with the surrounding bath of nuclei on time scales covering several orders of magnitude. Our results demonstrate (i) the intrinsic precession of the electron spin fluctuations around the effective Overhauser field caused by the host lattice nuclear spins, (ii) the comparably long time scales for electron and hole spin decoherence, as well as (iii) the dramatic enhancement of the spin lifetimes induced by a longitudinal magnetic field due to the decoupling of nuclear and charge carrier spins.

The spin dynamics in a broad range of systems can be studied using circularly polarized optical excitation with alternating helicity. The dependence of spin polarization on the frequency of helicity alternation, known as the spin inertia effect, is used here to study the spin dynamics in singly charged (In,Ga)As/GaAs quantum dots (QDs), providing insight into spin generation and accumulation processes. We demonstrate that the dependence of spin polarization in $n$- and $p$-type QDs on the external magnetic field has a characteristic $\mathsf{\text{V}}$- and $\mathsf{\text{M}}$-like shape, respectively. This difference is related to different microscopic mechanisms of the resident carriers' spin orientation. It allows us to determine the parameters of the spin dynamics both for the ground and excited states of singly charged QDs.

We report on theoretical and experimental study of the spin polarization recovery and Hanle effect for the charge carriers interacting with the fluctuating nuclear spins in the semiconductor structures. We start the theoretical description from the simplest model of static and isotropic nuclear spin fluctuations. Then we describe the modification of the polarization recovery and Hanle curves due to the anisotropy of the hyperfine interaction, finite nuclear spin correlation time, and the strong pulsed spin excitation. For the latter case, we predict the appearance of the resonant spin amplification in the Faraday geometry and of the quantum Zeno effect. The set of the experimental results for various structures and experimental conditions is chosen to highlight the specific effects predicted theoretically. We show that the joint analysis of the spin polarization recovery and the Hanle effect is a very valuable tool for addressing carrier spin dynamics in semiconductors and their nanostructures.

The spin inertia measurement is a recently emerged tool to study slow spin dynamics, which is based on the excitation of the system by a train of circularly polarized pulses with alternating helicity. Motivated by the experimental results reported by Zhukov et al. [ Phys. Rev. B 98, 121304(R) (2018)], we develop the general theory of spin inertia of localized charge carriers. We demonstrate that the spin inertia measurement in longitudinal magnetic field allows one to determine the parameters of the spin dynamics of resident charge carriers and of photoexcited trions, such as the spin relaxation times, longitudinal $g$ factors, parameters of hyperfine interaction, and nuclear spin correlation times.

In disordered systems, the hopping conductivity regime is usually realized at low temperatures where spin-related phenomena differ strongly from the cases of delocalized carriers. We develop the unified microscopic theory of current-induced spin orientation, spin-galvanic, and spin-Hall effects for the two-dimensional hopping regime. We show that the corresponding susceptibilities are proportional to each other and determined by the interplay between the drift and the diffusion spin currents. Estimations are made for realistic semiconductor heterostructures using the percolation theory. We show that the electrical spin polarization in the hopping regime increases exponentially with the increase of the concentration of localization sites and may reach a few percent at the crossover from the hopping to the diffusion conductivity regime.