Lecture
Joan van der Waals colloquium
- Marco Aprili (CNRS/Université Paris-Sud)
- Date
- Friday 20 April 2018
- Time
- Explanation
- Drinks afterwards.
- Location
-
Huygens
Niels Bohrweg 2
2333 CA Leiden - Room
- De Sitterzaal
Spin Physics in Mesoscopic Superconductors
Because of the singlet nature of Cooper pairs, the spin of electrons are thought to play no role in conventional superconductors and magnetism is often only seen as detrimental for superconductivity. I will show instead that it is possible to manipulate the macroscopic wavefunction of a superconductor by acting on the spin degree of freedom. I will first introduce our pioneering works on superconducting spintronics in hybrids devices and I will then present some very recent results on Josephson junctions in which an arbitrary phase shift is induced by spin-orbit coupling. Then, I will address the concept of Ising superconductivity which emerges in 2D doped semiconducting dichalcogenides in presence of strong spin-orbit and I will show that these materials are protected against an external applied Zeeman field as observed by tunneling spectroscopy. Finally I will show that an out-of-equilibrium magnetization with a surprisingly long relaxation time (10 ns) can be induced in a mesoscopic superconductor by spin injection.