Proximity effect in superconductor/conical magnet/ferromagnet heterostructures

Abstract

At the interface between a superconductor and a ferromagnetic metal spin-singlet Cooper pairs can penetrate into the ferromagnetic part of the heterostructure with an oscillating and decaying spin-singlet Cooper pair density. However, if the interface allows for a spin-mixing effect, equal-spin spin-triplet Cooper pairs can be generated that can penetrate much further into the ferromagnetic part of the heterostructure, known as the long-range proximity effect. Here, we present results of spin-mixing based on self-consistent solutions of the microscopic Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations incorporating a tight-binding model. In particular, we include a conical magnet into our model heterostructure to generate the spin-triplet Cooper pairs and analyse the influence of conical and ferromagnetic layer thickness on the unequal-spin and equal-spin spin-triplet pairing correlations. It will be show that, in agreement with experimental observations, a minimum thickness of the conical magnet is necessary to generate a sufficient amount of equal-spin spin-triplet Cooper pairs allowing for the long-range proximity effect.

14 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (10)

• A spin triplet supercurrent through the half-metallic ferromagnet CrO2
• Evidence for Triplet Superconductivity in a Superconductor-Ferromagnet Spin Valve
• Symmetries of Pairing Correlations in Superconductor-Ferromagnet Nanostructures
• Odd Triplet Pairing in clean Superconductor/Ferromagnet heterostructures
• Josephson effect due to the long-range odd-frequency triplet superconductivity in SFS junctions with Neel domain walls
• Pairing symmetry conversion by spin-active interfaces in superconducting junctions
• Induced Triplet Pairing in clean s-wave Superconductor/Ferromagnet layered structures
• Critical current of a Josephson junction containing a conical magnet
• Magnetic-coupling-dependent spin-triplet supercurrents in helimagnet/ferromagnet Josephson junctions
• Proximity Effects in Conical-Ferromagnet/Superconductor bilayers

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Spin-polarized supercurrents for spintronics: a review of current progress
• Proximity Induced Vortices and Long-Range Triplet Supercurrents in Ferromagnetic Josephson Junctions and Spin Valves
• Multiple scattering theory for superconducting heterostructures
• Magnetization induced by odd-frequency spin-triplet Cooper pairs in a Josephson junction with metallic trilayers
• Odd-triplet superconductivity in single-level quantum dots
• Magnetization Reversal by Tuning Rashba Spin-Orbit Interaction and Josephson Phase in a Ferromagnetic Josephson Junction
• Control of superconductivity with a single ferromagnetic layer in niobium/erbium bilayers
• Long-range proximity effect in Nb-based heterostructures induced by a magnetically inhomogeneous permalloy layer
• Proximity effect in superconductor/conical magnet heterostructures
• Triplet superconductivity and proximity effect induced by Bloch and Néel domain walls
• Classification of magnetic inhomogeneities and $0-\pi$ transitions in superconducting-magnetic hybrid structures
• Theoretical study of magnetism induced by proximity effect in a ferromagnetic Josephson junction with a normal metal
• Spin-flipping with Holmium: Case study of proximity effect in superconductor/ferromagnet/superconductor heterostructures
• Phase separation and proximity effects in itinerant ferromagnet-superconductor heterostructures