SPICE Workshop on Hybrid Correlated States and Dynamics in Quantum Materials, May 14th - 16th 2024
Jason Robinson
Superconducting spintronics or superspintronics is a new area of research involving the compatible coexistence of spin-polarization and superconducting phase coherence [1]. This field has the potential to offer real impact in spintronics and has emerged over the past decade and a half following rapid developments in the understanding of unconventional electron pairing at interfaces between superconducting and magnetic materials. For example, it is now established that at a magnetically inhomogeneous superconductor / ferromagnet (S/F) interface, spin-singlet Cooper pairs can convert to a spin-aligned triplet state and so create supercurrents that carry both charge and a net spin component [1,2]. Other recent highlights include massive improvements in the development of magnetization- and gate-electric-control of superconductivity in S and S/F structures [3-4], rectification of supercurrents in S and S/F structures (with vortices [4] and/or broken inversion symmetry [6]), and gate-control of superconductivity. This lecture will briefly review state-of-the-art developments in superspintronics with a focus on devices that could enable programmable control of superconductivity.
[1] J Linder and JWA Robinson, Nature Physics 11, 307 (2015).[2] M Amundsen*, J Linder*, JWA Robinson, I Žutić, N Banerjee, arXiv: 2210.03549 (2023); To appear in Reviews of Modern Physics (Colloquium) (2024).
[3] K-R Jeon et al., Nature Materials 17, 499–503 (2018).
[4] L Ruf, C Puglia, T Elalaily, G De Simoni, F Joint, M Berke, J Koch, A Iorio, S Khorshidian, P Makk, A Vecchione, S Gasparinetti, S Csonka, W Belzig, M Cuoco, F Giazotto, E Scheer, A Di Bernardo, arXiv:2302.13734 (2023).
[5] Gutfreund, H Matsuki, V Plastovets, A Noah, L Gorzawski, N Fridman, G Yang, A Buzdin, O Millo, JWA Robinson, Y Anahory, Nature Communications 14, 1630 (2023).
[6] Muhammad Nadeem, MS Fuhrer, X Wang, Nature Reviews Physics 5, 558–577 (2023).