skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Peculiar long-range supercurrent in superconductor-ferromagnet-superconductor junction containing a noncollinear magnetic domain in the ferromagnetic region

Journal Article · · Journal of Applied Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4905608· OSTI ID:22412818
 [1];  [2];  [1]
  1. School of Physics and Telecommunication Engineering, Shaanxi University of Technology, Hanzhong 723001 (China)
  2. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093 (China)

We study the supercurrent in clean superconductor-ferromagnet-superconductor heterostructure containing a noncollinear magnetic domain in the ferromagnetic region. It is demonstrated that the magnetic domain can lead to a spin-flip scattering process, which reverses the spin orientations of the singlet Cooper pair and simultaneously changes the sign of the corresponding electronic momentum. If the ferromagnetic layers on both sides of magnetic domain have the same features, the long-range proximity effect will take place. That is because the singlet Cooper pair will create an exact phase-cancellation effect and gets an additional π phase shift as it passes through the entire ferromagnetic region. Then, the equal spin triplet pair only exists in the magnetic domain region and can not diffuse into the other two ferromagnetic layers. So, the supercurrent mostly arises from the singlet Cooper pairs, and the equal spin triplet pairs are not involved. This result can provide a approach for generating the long-range supercurrent.

OSTI ID:
22412818
Journal Information:
Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 117, Issue 2; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-8979
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English