Extremely long quasiparticle spin lifetimes in superconducting aluminium using MgO tunnel spin injectors

Abstract

There has been an intense search in recent years for long-lived spin-polarized carriers for spintronic and quantum-computing devices. Here we report that spin polarized quasi-particles in superconducting aluminum layers have surprisingly long spin-lifetimes, nearly a million times longer than in their normal state. The lifetime is determined from the suppression of the aluminum's superconductivity resulting from the accumulation of spin polarized carriers in the aluminum layer using tunnel spin injectors. A Hanle effect, observed in the presence of small in-plane orthogonal fields, is shown to be quantitatively consistent with the presence of long-lived spin polarized quasi-particles. Our experiments show that the superconducting state can be significantly modified by small electric currents, much smaller than the critical current, which is potentially useful for devices involving superconducting qubits.

References in corpus (4)

• Direct electronic measurement of the spin Hall effect
• Electronic measurement and control of spin transport in Silicon
• Spin injection and relaxation in a mesoscopic superconductor
• Oblique Hanle Effect in Semiconductor Spin Transport Devices

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Spin Imbalance and Spin-Charge Separation in a Mesoscopic Superconductor
• Long-range spin-polarized quasiparticle transport in mesoscopic Al superconductors with a Zeeman splitting
• Spin-polarized quasiparticle transport in exchange-split superconducting aluminum on europium sulfide
• Long-range spin and charge accumulation in mesoscopic superconductors with Zeeman splitting
• Spin injection from a normal metal into a mesoscopic superconductor
• Long-range spin imbalance in mesoscopic superconductors under a Zeeman splitting
• Non-equilibrium spin transport in Zeeman-split superconductors
• Adiabatic and nonadiabatic spin torques induced by spin-triplet supercurrent
• Conservation of spin supercurrents in superconductors
• Spin Hanle effect in mesoscopic superconductors
• A novel superconducting-velocity--tunable quasiparticle state and spin relaxation in GaAs (100) quantum wells in proximity to $s$-wave superconductor
• Spin Hall effect generated by fluctuating vortices in type-II superconductors
• Quantum kinetic equations and anomalous non-equilibrium Cooper pair spin accumulation in Rashba wires with Zeeman splitting
• Spin injection and spin relaxation in odd-frequency superconductors