Superconducting Valve Exploiting Interplay between Spin-Orbit and Exchange Interactions

We theoretically investigated the proximity effect in SN [Formula: see text] F and SF’F structures consisting of a superconductor (S), a normal metal (N [Formula: see text]), and ferromagnetic (F’,F) thin films with spin–orbit interaction (SOI) in the N [Formula: see text] layer. We show that a normal layer with spin–orbit interaction effectively suppresses triplet correlations generated in a ferromagnetic layer. Due to this effect, the critical temperature of the superconducting layer in the SN [Formula: see text] F multilayer turns out to be higher than in a similar multilayer without spin–orbit interaction in the N layer. Moreover, in the presence of a mixed type of spin–orbit interaction involving the Rashba and Dresselhaus components, the SN [Formula: see text] F structure is a spin valve, whose critical temperature is determined by the direction of the magnetization vector in the F layer. We calculated the control characteristics of the SN [Formula: see text] F spin valve and compared them with those available in traditional SF’F devices with two ferromagnetic layers. We concluded that SN [Formula: see text] F structures with one controlled F layer provide solid advantages over the broadly considered SF’F spin valves, paving the way for high-performance storage components for superconducting electronics.