Optimizing the topological properties of stacking semiconductor-ferromagnet-superconductor heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper investigates a semiconductor-ferromagnet-superconductor heterostructure with a spin filtering barrier, demonstrating how external gating can enhance key physical properties and optimize device performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stacked heterostructure design that enhances Rashba spin-orbit coupling, exchange coupling, and superconducting pairing simultaneously, with optimization strategies.

Findings

External gating enhances all three physical quantities.

Stacked device geometry offers advantages over conventional devices.

Analytic and numerical methods confirm optimization strategies.

Abstract

We study the electronic properties of a planar semiconductor-superconductor heterostructure, in which a thin ferromagnetic insulator layer lies in between and acts as a spin filtering barrier. We find that in such a system one can simultaneously enhance the strengths of all the three important induced physical quantities, i.e., Rashba spin-orbit coupling, exchange coupling, and superconducting pairing potential, for the hybrid mode by external gating. Our results show specific advantage of this stacked device geometry compared to conventional devices. We further discuss how to optimize geometrical parameters for the heterostructure and complement our numerical simulations with analytic calculations.