Electrically detected nuclear magnetic resonance in GaAs/AlGaAs-based quantum point contacts

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a well-known technique with widespread applications in physics, chemistry and medicine. Conventional NMR studies use inductive coils to detect the magnetic field produced by precessing nuclear spins; this approach requires on the order of $10^{12}$ spins for detection. Recently, resistive detection of NMR through the hyperfine interaction has been demonstrated with electrons in mesoscopic 2- and 1-dimensional devices based on high-quality GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. These studies are typically sensitive to $10^8$ spins, enabling NMR on much smaller sample volumes. Holes are predicted to have much weaker nuclear spin coupling than electrons, which could be relevant to the emerging fields of spintronics and quantum information processing. We present a preliminary comparison between the magnitude of the NMR signal in electron and hole quantum point contacts.