Dr Xavier Montiel (Royal Holloway University of London)

Generation of pure superconducting spin current in magnetic heterostructures via non-locally induced magnetism

We propose a mechanism for the generation of pure superconducting spin-current carried by equal-spin triplet Cooper pairs in a superconductor (S) sandwiched between a ferromagnet (F) and a normal metal (Nso) with intrinsic spin-orbit coupling. We show that in the presence of Landau Fermi-liquid interactions the superconducting proximity effect can induce non-locally a ferromagnetic exchange field in the normal layer, which disappears above the superconducting transition temperature of the structure. The internal Landau Fermi-liquid exchange field leads to the onset of a spin supercurrent associated with the generation of long-range spin-triplet superconducting correlations in the trilayer. We demonstrate that the magnitude of the spin supercurrent as well as the induced magnetic order in the Nso layer depends critically on the superconducting proximity effect between the S layer and the F and Nso layers and the magnitude of the relevant Landau Fermi-liquid interaction parameter. Our results demonstrate the crucial role of Landau Fermi-liquid interaction in combination with spin-orbit coupling for the creation of spin supercurrent in superconducting spintronics.

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