Résumé
We report on the unusual and counterintuitive behavior of spin lifetime of excitons in coupled semiconductor quantum wells (CQWs) in the presence of in-plane magnetic field. Instead of conventional acceleration of spin relaxation due to the Larmor precession of electron and hole spins, we observe a strong increase of the spin relaxation time at low magnetic fields followed by saturation and decrease at higher fields. We argue that this nonmonotonic spin relaxation dynamics is a fingerprint of the magnetic quantum confined Stark effect. In the presence of electric field along the CQW growth axis, an applied magnetic field efficiently suppresses the exciton spin coherence, due to inhomogeneous broadening of the g-factor distribution.