Spin Relaxation Mechanism in Graphene: Resonant Scattering by Magnetic Impurities

We propose that the observed small (100 ps) spin relaxation time in graphene is due to resonant scattering by local magnetic moments. At resonances, magnetic moments behave as spin hot spots: the spin-flip scattering rates are as large as the spin-conserving ones, as long as the exchange interaction is greater than the resonance width. Smearing of the resonance peaks by the presence of electron-hole puddles gives quantitative agreement with experiment, for about 1 ppm of local moments. Although magnetic moments can come from a variety of sources, we specifically consider hydrogen adatoms, which are also resonant scatterers. The same mechanism would also work in the presence of a strong local spin-orbit interaction, but this would require heavy adatoms on graphene or a much greater coverage density of light adatoms. To make our mechanism more transparent, we also introduce toy atomic chain models for resonant scattering of electrons in the presence of a local magnetic moment and Rashba spin-orbit interaction.