Synergy of exchange bias with superconductivity in ferromagnetic-superconducting layered hybrids: the influence of in-plane and out-of-plane magnetic order on superconductivity

Abstract

It is generally believed that superconductivity and magnetism are two antagonistic long-range phenomena. However, as it was preliminarily highlighted in D. Stamopoulos et al. [Phys. Rev. B 75, 014501 (2007)] and extensively studied in this work under specific circumstances these phenomena instead of being detrimental to each other may even become cooperative so that their synergy may promote the superconducting properties of a hybrid structure. Here, we have studied systematically the magnetic and transport behavior of such exchange biased hybrids that are comprised of ferromagnetic (FM) Ni80Fe20 and low-Tc superconducting (SC) Nb for the case where the magnetic field is applied parallel to the specimens. Two structures have been studied: FM-SC-FM trilayers (TLs) and FM-SC bilayers (BLs). Detailed magnetization data on the longitudinal and transverse magnetic components are presented for both the normal and superconducting states. These data are compared to systematic transport measurements including I-V characteristics. The comparison of the exchange biased BLs and TLs that are studied here with the plain ones studied in D. Stamopoulos et al. [Phys. Rev. B 75, 184504 (2007)] enable us to reveal an underlying parameter that may falsify the interpretation of the transport properties of relevant FM-SC-FM TLs and FM-SC BLs investigated in the recent literature: the underlying mechanism motivating the extreme magnetoresistance peaks in the TLs relates to the suppression of superconductivity mainly due to the magnetic coupling of the two FM layers as the out-of-plane rotation of their magnetizations takes place across the coercive field where stray fields emerge in their whole surface owing to the multidomain magnetic state that they acquire.

20 pages, 20 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Symmetries of Pairing Correlations in Superconductor-Ferromagnet Nanostructures
• Effect of an inhomogeneous exchange field on the proximity effect in disordered superconductor-ferromagnet hybrid structures
• Switching superconductivity in S/F bilayers by multiple-domain structures
• Stray-fields-based magnetoresistance mechanism in Ni80Fe20-Nb-Ni80Fe20 trilayers
• Phase Diagrams of Ferromagnet-Superconductor Multilayers with Misaligned Exchange Fields
• Manipulating superconductivity through the domain structure of a ferromagnet: experimental aspects and theoretical implications
• Enhanced superconducting proximity effect in clean ferromagnetic domain structures
• Spin-dependent localized Hartree-Fock density-functional approach for the accurate treatment of inner-shell excitation of close-shell atoms

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• Penetration depth of Cooper pairs in the IrMn antiferromagnet
• Dimensional Crossover of Microscopic Magnetic Metasurfaces for Magnetic Field Amplification