Proximity effect and p-wave superconductivity in s-wave superconductor/helimagnet heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper investigates how proximity effects and p-wave superconductivity manifest in superconductor/helimagnet heterostructures, revealing complex dependencies on magnetic and electronic parameters, with implications for dissipationless spintronics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the proximity effect and p-wave triplet correlations in atomically thin superconductor/helimagnet heterostructures, highlighting their dependence on magnetic exchange and filling factors.

Findings

Proximity effect strength varies with exchange field and filling factors.

p-wave correlations enable spin supercurrent flow.

Physical link between spin supercurrent and magnet conicity is established.

Abstract

It is known that in contrast to homogeneous ferromagnetism helical magnetism is compatible with superconductivity and causes only weak suppressive effect on superconducting critical temperature. Despite this fact it induces p-wave triplet superconducting correlations in homogeneous superconducting systems with intrinsic helical magnetism. The combination of these two facts indicates a high potential for the application of such systems in disspationless spintronics. For this reason here we investigate the proximity effect in atomically thin superconductor/helical (conical) magnet heterostructures (SC/HM). It is shown that in SC/HM heterostructures the strength of the proximity effect and, in particular, amplitude of p-wave triplet superconductivity and the degree of superconductivity suppression are complex functions of the magnet exchange field and filling factors of the magnet and the superconductor. Further we demonstrate that $p$-wave correlations ensure transport spin supercurrent flow in the SC/HM heterostructure with conical magnets and unveil the physical relationship between the transport spin supercurrent, degree of the magnet conicity and internal structure of p-wave correlations in the momentum space.