Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
SUPERCONDUCTING SPINTRONICS: Superconductor/Ferromagnet Structures with Spin-Orbit Coupling Jabir Ali Ouassou¹, Jacob Linder¹ ¹Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway In structures that consist of superconductors in conjunction with normal metals, superconducting properties can also be induced over mesoscopic distances in the adjacent material, a phenomenon known as the proximity effect. It turns out that if the normal metal has inherent magnetic properties, the proximity coupling can give rise to a plethora of novel physical phenomena, which in recent years has garnered a lot of interest from theorists and experimentalists alike. One particularly striking effect, is that the presence of either (i) an inhomogeneous magnetic field or (ii) a spin-orbit coupling can lead to long-range triplet generation (Bergeret et al., 2001 Phys. Rev. B 86 4096; Bergeret & Tokatly, 2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 117003). This constitutes a kind of superconductivity carried by electron pairs in the triplet state |↑↑) or |↓↓), whereas conventional superconductivity is restricted to pairs in the singlet state |↑↓) − |↓↑). Thus the generation and manipulation of spinpolarized supercurrents is made possible by superconductor/ferromagnet hybrid structures, an effect that already has been realized in experiments (Keizer et al., 2006 Nature 439 825), and which could possibly lead to new types of device functionality based on spintronics. In this presentation, we will first provide a brief introduction to the superconductivity of such hybrid structures, including the essential equations which are used in a quantitative treatment of the matter. Then, we will present theoretical predictions for the effect of spin-orbit coupling on superconductor/ferromagnet bilayers. This includes indications of a triplet spin-valve effect in such bilayers, which means that the superconductivity throughout the structure can be switched on/off by a π/2 rotation of the magnetic field orientation in the ferromagnet. Keywords: Spintronics, Proximity Effect, Superconductivity, Ferromagnetism, Spin-Orbit Coupling.