Theorists make discovery in odd triplet pairing

In a paper which will shortly appear in Physical Review Letters, School of Physics and Astronomy Professor Oriol Valls along with lead author Klaus Halterman (China Lake, Naval Warfare Center) and co-author Paul Barsic (University of Minnesota) show that triplet superconducting pairing, odd in time, is induced in clean heterostructures consisting of an ordinary s-wave superconductor sandwiched between ferromagnets.

The paper ("Odd triplet pairing in clean Superconductor/Ferromagnet heterostructures") shows that the triplet correlations are spatially very long ranged.

They are largest at times of the order of the inverse of the cutoff frequency (usually the Debye frequency) of the s-wave superconducting interaction. The spatial behavior of these correlations is also discussed.

This phenomenon has implications not only for ordinary heterostructures but also for fermionic superfluidity in atomic systems, where different mechanisms for induced exotic superconductivity have been recently proposed (e.g. PRL 97, 020402, (2006)).

More information at arxiv.org/abs/0704.1820

Source: by Jenny Allan, University of Minnesota