Eur. Phys. J. B 83, 493-497 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-20044-y

Regular Article

Spin triplet Andreev reflection induced by interface spin-orbit coupling in half-metal/superconductor junctions

School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China

^a e-mail: billmarx@pku.edu.cn

Received: 15 January 2011
Received in final form: 30 August 2011
Published online: 24 October 2011

Abstract

We show that with interface spin-orbit coupling, triplet pairing can occur in the half-metal/superconductor junction. The tunneling conductance is different from the usual Andreev reflection and strongly depends on the polarisation orientation. The probability of triplet pairing for different incident angles and zero-biased conductance are also calculated. The mechanism for the formation of the triplet pairing is that the interface spin-orbit coupling provides an effective spin-flip barrier, which couples all the transport modes in spin Nambu space. Because of its unique particle hole symmetry, this spin-orbit coupling interface effect is different from the spin-flip ferromagnetic barrier which induces zero-bias conductance vanishing and finite V-shape conductance within the energy gap.