Triplet generation and upper critical field in superconducting spin valves based on CrO2

Abstract

It has been recently reported that a superconducting triplet spin valve (TSV) based on the half-metallic CrO2 can show “colossal” variations of the critical temperature, up to more than 1 K. This can be achieved when the magnetic noncollinearity between the mixer (F1) and the drainage ferromagnetic layer (F) is maximized. In this work we investigate further such TSV devices looking at two aspects: first, we present the dependence of the TSV effect on the thickness of the mixer layer; second, we look at the perpendicular upper critical field Hc2⊥ as a function of the temperature. The thickness dependence, which is nonmonotonic as expected, represents a further proof that the effect is due to the generation of equal-spin triplet Cooper pairs, while what we observe for the Hc2⊥ versus T curves is an interesting and peculiar behavior: there is a clear deviation from the universal linear dependence and the average slope is suppressed much more than what can be described with the formalism used for conventional proximized structures.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

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