Magnetic confinement of the superconducting condensate in superconductor/ferromagnet hybrid composites

Abstract

The influence of an inhomogeneous magnetic field on the magnetoresistance of thin Al films, used in different superconductor/ferromagnet hybrids, has been investigated. Two contrasting magnetic textures with out-of-plane magnetization are explored, namely (i) a plain film in a multidomain state and (ii) an array of micro-sized dots. The stray fields of the ferromagnetic structures confine the superconducting condensate and, accordingly, modify the condition for the nucleation of superconductivity. By switching between different magnetic states of the ferromagnet, this confinement can be tuned at will, hereby reversibly changing the dependence of the critical temperature Tc on an external magnetic field H. In particular, the continuous evolution from a conventional linear Tc(H) dependence with a single maximum to a reentrant superconducting phase boundary with multiple Tc peaks has been demonstrated.

References in corpus (1)

• Tunable Field Induced Superconductivity

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Effect of ferromagnetic film thickness on magnetoresistance of thin-film superconductor-ferromagnet hybrids
• Tunable phase diagram and vortex pinning in a superconductor-ferromagnet bilayer
• Mesoscopic cross-film cryotrons: Vortex trapping and dc-Josephson-like oscillations of the critical current
• Magnetic Field Distribution Due to Domain Walls in Unconventional Superconductors