Signatures of retroreflection and induced triplet electron-hole correlations in ferromagnet–s-wave-superconductor structures

J. Linder; A. Sudbø

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.75.134509

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Signatures of retroreflection and induced triplet electron-hole correlations in ferromagnet–s-wave-superconductor structures

J. Linder, A. Sudbø

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.75.134509 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

We present a theoretical study of a ferromagnet–s-wave-superconductor junction to investigate the signatures of induced triplet correlations in the system. We apply the extended Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk formalism and allow for an arbitrary magnetization strength and direction of the ferromagnet, a spin-active barrier, Fermi-vector mismatch, and different effective masses in the two systems. It is found that the phase associated with the xy components of the magnetization in the ferromagnet couples with the superconducting phase and induces spin triplet pairing correlations in the superconductor, if the tunneling barrier acts as a spin filter. This feature leads to an induced spin-triplet pairing correlation in the ferromagnet, along with a spin-triplet electron-hole coherence due to an interplay between the ferromagnetic and superconducting phases. As our main result, we investigate the experimental signatures of retrorelection, manifested in the tunneling conductance of a ferromagnet–s-wave-superconductor junction with a spin-active interface.