Superconducting Valve Exploiting Interplay between Spin-Orbit and Exchange Interactions

Abstract

We theoretically investigated the proximity effect in SN (Formula presented.) F and SF’F structures consisting of a superconductor (S), a normal metal (N (Formula presented.)), and ferromagnetic (F’,F) thin films with spin–orbit interaction (SOI) in the N (Formula presented.) layer. We show that a normal layer with spin–orbit interaction effectively suppresses triplet correlations generated in a ferromagnetic layer. Due to this effect, the critical temperature of the superconducting layer in the SN (Formula presented.) F multilayer turns out to be higher than in a similar multilayer without spin–orbit interaction in the N layer. Moreover, in the presence of a mixed type of spin–orbit interaction involving the Rashba and Dresselhaus components, the SN (Formula presented.) F structure is a spin valve, whose critical temperature is determined by the direction of the magnetization vector in the F layer. We calculated the control characteristics of the SN (Formula presented.) F spin valve and compared them with those available in traditional SF’F devices with two ferromagnetic layers. We concluded that SN (Formula presented.) F structures with one controlled F layer provide solid advantages over the broadly considered SF’F spin valves, paving the way for high-performance storage components for superconducting electronics.