Mechanism of half-frequency electric dipole spin resonance in double quantum dots: Effect of nonlinear charge dynamics inside the singlet manifold

Electron dynamics in quantum dots manifests itself in spin-flip spectra through electric dipole spin resonance (EDSR). Near a neutrality point separating two different singlet charged states of a double quantum dot, charge dynamics inside a 2 x 2 singlet manifold can be described by a 1/2 pseudospin. In this region, charge dynamics is highly nonlinear and strongly influenced by flopping its soft pseudospin mode. As a result, the responses to external driving include first and second harmonics of the driving frequency and their Raman satellites shifted by the pseudospin frequency. In EDSR spectra of a spin-orbit couplet doublet dot, they manifest themselves as charge satellites of spin-flip transitions. The theory describes gross features of the anomalous half-frequency EDSR in spin blockade spectra [E. A. Laird et al., Semicond. Sci. Technol. 24, 064004 (2009)].