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Long-ranged triplet supercurrent in a single in-plane ferromagnet with spin-orbit coupled contacts to superconductors

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posted on 2020-02-11, 09:51 authored by JR Eskilt, M Amundsen, Niladri Banerjee, J Linder
© 2019 American Physical Society. By converting conventional spin-singlet Cooper pairs to polarized spin-triplet pairs, it is possible to sustain long-ranged spin-polarized supercurrents flowing through strong ferromagnets. Obtaining such a conversion via spin-orbit interactions, rather than magnetic inhomogeneities, has recently been explored in the literature. A challenging aspect with regard to experimental detection has been that in order for Rashba spin-orbit interactions, present, e.g., at interfaces due to inversion symmetry breaking, to generate such long-ranged supercurrents, an out-of-plane component of the magnetization is required. This limits the choice of materials and can induce vortices in the superconducting region complicating the interpretation of measurements. Therefore, it would be desirable to identify a way in which Rashba spin-orbit interactions can induce long-ranged supercurrents for purely in-plane rotations of the magnetization. Here, we show that this is possible in a lateral Josephson junction where two superconducting electrodes are placed in contact with a ferromagnetic film via two thin, heavy normal metals. The magnitude of the supercurrent in such a setup becomes tunable by the in-plane magnetization angle when using only a single magnetic layer. These results could provide a new and simpler way to generate controllable spin-polarized supercurrents than previous experiments which utilized complicated magnetically textured Josephson junctions.

Funding

Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme Grant No. 262633

EPSRC New Investigator Award EP/S016430/1

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Physics

Published in

Physical Review B

Volume

100

Issue

22

Pages

(9)

Publisher

American Physical Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© American Physical Society

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review B and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.100.224519

Publication date

2019-12-27

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

2469-9950

eISSN

2469-9969

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Niladri Banerjee Deposit date: 7 February 2020

Article number

224519

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