Fully spin-dependent boundary condition for isotropic quasiclassical Green's functions

Abstract

Transport in superconducting heterostructures is very successfully described with quasiclassical Green's functions augmented by microscopically derived boundary conditions. However, so far the spin-dependence is in the diffusive approach included only for limiting cases. Here, we derive the fully spin-dependent boundary condition completing the Usadel equation and the circuit theory. Both, material specific spin-degrees of freedom and spin-dependent interface effects, i.e. spin-mixing and polarization of the transmission coefficients are treated exactly. This opens the road to accurately describe a completely new class of mesoscopic circuits including materials with strong intrinsic magnetic structure. We also discuss several experimentally relevant cases like the tunnel limit, a ferromagnetic insulator with arbitrarily strong magnetization and the limit of small spin-mixing.

5 pages