Josephson current in ballistic heterostructures with spin-active interfaces

Abstract

We develop a general microscopic theory of dc Josephson effect in hybrid SNS structures with ballistic electrodes and spin-active NS interfaces. We establish a direct relation between the spectrum of Andreev levels and the Josephson current which contains complete information about non-trivial interplay between Andreev reflection and spin-dependent interface scattering. The system exhibits a rich structure of properties sensitive to spin-dependent barrier transmissions, spin-mixing angles, relative magnetization orientation of interfaces and the kinematic phase of scattered electrons. We analyze the current-phase relations and identify the conditions for the presence of a pi-junction state in the systems under consideration. We also analyze resonant enhancement of the supercurrent in gate-voltage-driven nanojunctions. As compared to the non-magnetic case, this effect can be strongly modified by spin-dependent scattering at NS interfaces.

11 pages, 9 figures; version published in Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (5)

• Symmetries of Pairing Correlations in Superconductor-Ferromagnet Nanostructures
• Critical Current 0-$\pi$ Transition in Designed Josephson Quantum Dot Junctions
• Splitting of Andreev levels in a Josephson junction by spin-orbit coupling
• Josephson current and Andreev states in superconductor-half metal-superconductor heterostructures
• Spin-resolved crossed Andreev reflection in ballistic heterostructures