Magnetic impurities in a superconductor: Effect of domain walls and interference

Abstract

We consider the effect of magnetic impurities, modeled by classical spins, in a conventional superconductor. We study their effect on the quasiparticles, specifically on the spin density and local density of states (LDOS). As previously emphasized, the impurities induce multiple scatterings of the quasiparticle wave functions leading to complex interference phenomena. Also, the impurities induce quantum phase transitions in the many-body system. Previous authors studied the effect of either a small number of impurities (from one to three) or a finite concentration of impurities, typically in a disordered distribution. In this work we assume a regular set of spins distributed inside the superconductor in such a way that the spins are oriented, forming different types of domain walls, assumed stable. This situation may be particularly interesting in the context of spin transfer due to polarized currents traversing the material.

26 pages, 26 figures (72 in total)

References in corpus (4)

• Manipulating spin and charge in magnetic semiconductors usingsuperconducting vortices
• Oscillations of Induced Magnetization in Superconductor-Ferromagnet Heterostructures
• Impurities, Quantum Interference and Quantum Phase Transitions in s-wave superconductors
• Quasiparticle interference patterns as a test for the nature of the pseudogap phase in the cuprate superconductors

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Fidelity Between Partial States as Signature of Quantum Phase Transitions
• Entanglement signatures of the quantum phase transition induced by a magnetic impurity in a superconductor
• Supercurrent-Induced Spin-Orbit Torques
• Re-entrant topological order in strongly correlated nanowire due to Rashba spin-orbit coupling