Affiliation
Centro de Física de Materiales
Title of work
Current rectification in junctions with spin-split superconductors
Abstract
Spin-split superconductors exhibit an electron-hole asymmetric spin-resolved density of states, but the symmetry is restored upon averaging over spin. On the other hand, asymmetry appears
again in tunneling junctions of spin-split superconductors with a spin-polarized barrier. As demonstrated recently in both theory and experiment, this fact leads to a particularly strong thermoelectric effect in superconductor-ferromagnet structures. In this work we show another important effect stemming from the electron-hole asymmetry - current rectification. We calculate the charge current in spin-polarized tunnel junctions of normal metal and a spin-split superconductor with AC and DC voltage bias. In the DC case, the I-V curve is not fully antisymmetric and has a voltage-symmetric component due to spin polarization. This translates to the existence of a rectified current in the AC case, which is proportional to the spin polarization of the junction and strongly depends on the
frequency of the applied bias. Possible applications of the rectification effect include a diode for superconducting electronics and radiation detectors.