Influence of magnetic impurities on charge transport in diffusive-normal-metal/superconductor junctions

Abstract

Charge transport in the diffusive normal metal (DN)/insulator/s- and d-wave superconductor junctions is studied in the presence of magnetic impurities in DN in the framework of the quasiclassical Usadel equations with the generalized boundary conditions. The cases of s- and d-wave superconducting electrodes are considered. The junction conductance is calculated as a function of a bias voltage for various parameters of the DN metal, resistivity, Thouless energy, the magnetic impurity scattering rate, and the transparency of the insulating barrier between DN and a superconductor. It is shown that the proximity effect is suppressed by magnetic impurity scattering in DN for any value of the barrier transparency. In low-transparent s-wave junctions this leads to the suppression of the normalized zero-bias conductance. In contrast to that, in high transparent junctions zero-bias conductance is enhanced by magnetic impurity scattering. The physical origin of this effect is discussed. For the d-wave junctions, the dependence on the misorientation angle α between the interface normal and the crystal axis of a superconductor is studied. The zero-bias conductance peak is suppressed by the magnetic impurity scattering only for low transparent junctions with α∼0. In other cases the conductance of the d-wave junctions does not depend on the magnetic impurity scattering due to strong suppression of the proximity effect by the midgap Andreev resonant states.

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