Inhomogeneous vortex-state-driven enhancement of superconductivity in nanoengineered ferromagnet-superconductor heterostructures

Abstract

Thin film heterostructures provide a powerful means to study the antagonism between superconductivity (SC) and ferromagnetism (FM). One interesting issue in FM-SC hybrids which defies the notion of antagonistic orders is the observation of magnetic field induced superconductivity (FIS). Here we show that in systems where the FM domains/islands produce spatial inhomogeneities of the SC order parameter, the FIS can derive significant contribution from different mobilities of the magnetic flux identified by two distinct critical states in the inhomogeneous superconductor. Our experiments on nanoengineered bilayers of ferromagnetic CoPt and superconducting NbN where CoPt/NbN islands are separated by a granular NbN, lend support to this alternative explanation of FIS in certain class of FM-SC hybrids.

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References in corpus (8)

• Granular Electronic Systems
• Ferromagnet-Superconductor Hybrids
• Nanoengineered magnetic-field-induced superconductivity
• Enhancement of the superconducting transition temperature in Nb/Permalloy bilayers by controlling the domain state of the ferromagnet
• Domain wall superconductivity in hybrid superconductor -- ferromagnetic structures
• Magnetization Controlled Superconductivity in a Film with Magnetic Dots
• Correlations between morphology, crystal structure and magnetization of epitaxial cobalt-platinum films grown with pulsed laser ablation
• Influence of randomly distributed magnetic nanoparticles on surface superconductivity in Nb films

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Nucleation of superconductivity and vortex matter in superconductor - ferromagnet hybrids
• Effect of ferromagnetic film thickness on magnetoresistance of thin-film superconductor-ferromagnet hybrids
• Crossover between different regimes of inhomogeneous superconductivity in planar superconductor-ferromagnet hybrids