Perfect spin nonreciprocity in gated superconducting altermagnetic heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that gating a superconducting altermagnet heterostructure enables perfect nonreciprocal spin-polarized currents, with tunable polarity and high quality factors, advancing superconducting spintronics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to achieve perfect nonreciprocal spin and charge currents in superconducting altermagnetic heterostructures through gating and momentum channel filtering.

Findings

Nonreciprocal local and nonlocal spin currents with high tunability.

Charge currents also exhibit nonreciprocity with high quality factors.

Currents are sensitive to the altermagnetic field, enabling magnetic state identification.

Abstract

We consider a superconducting altermagnet heterostructure and demonstrate that the interplay between altermagnetism and a selective filter of transverse momentum channels enables perfect nonreciprocal spin-polarized currents. We demonstrate that this nonreciprocity manifests in both local and nonlocal spin currents, signalling the emergence of directionally selective local and nonlocal spin behaviors. We show that the selective filter of transverse momentum channels is realized by gating a finite normal region between the superconducting altermagnet and the metallic reservoir, which then directionally selects transport channels that match the momentum-dependent spin-split superconducting altermagnetic states, allowing for nonreciprocal spin-polarized currents. We discover that the local and nonlocal spin nonreciprocity features a highly tunable polarity and nearly perfect quality factors, respectively, which is achieved by means of gate voltages and by varying the length of the finite region. Moreover, we find that local and nonlocal charge currents also develop a nonreciprocal behavior, whose quality factors can also reach perfect values. In all cases, the spin and charge currents are sensitive to variations of the altermagnetic field, a functional dependence that can be exploited to identify the type of altermagnetism. Our findings put forward an electrically controllable route towards nonreciprocal superconducting spintronic devices based on altermagnets.