Vanishing Meissner effect as a hallmark of in-plane FFLO instability in superconductor - ferromagnet layered systems

We demonstrate that in a wide class of multilayered superconductor - ferromagnet structures (e.g., S/F, S/F/N and S/F/F') the vanishing Meissner effect signals the appearance of the in-plane Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) modulated superconducting phase. In contrast to the bulk superconductors the FFLO instability in these systems can emerge at temperatures close to the critical one and is effectively controlled by the S layer thickness and the angle between magnetization vectors in the F/F' bilayers. The predicted FFLO state reveals through the critical temperature oscillations vs the perpendicular magnetic field component.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Physical Limits of the ballistic and non-ballistic Spin-Field-Effect Transistor: Spin Dynamics in Remote Doped Structures

We investigate the spin dynamics and relaxation in remotely-doped two dimensional electron systems where the dopants lead to random fluctuations of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Due to the resulting random spin precession, the spin relaxation time is limited by the strength and spatial scale of the random contribution to the spin-orbit coupling. We concentrate on the role of the randomness for two systems where the direction of the spin-orbit field does not depend on the electron momentum: the spin field-effect transistor with balanced Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings and the (011) quantum well. Both of these systems are considered as promising for the spintronics applications because of the suppression of the Dyakonov-Perel' mechanism there makes the realization of a spin field effect transistor in the diffusive regime possible. We demonstrate that the spin relaxation through the randomness of spin-orbit coupling imposes important physical limitations on the operational properties of these devices.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Non-exponential spin relaxation in magnetic field in quantum wells with random spin-orbit coupling

We investigate the spin dynamics of electrons in quantum wells where the Rashba type of spin-orbit coupling is present in the form of random nanosize domains. We study the effect of magnetic field on the spin relaxation in these systems and show that the spatial randomness of spin-orbit coupling limits the minimum relaxation rate and leads to a Gaussian time-decay of spin polarization due to memory effects. In this case the relaxation becomes faster with increase of the magnetic field in contrast to the well known magnetic field suppression of spin relaxation.Comment: published version, minor change

Spin relaxation in quantum dots with random spin-orbit coupling

We investigate the longitudinal spin relaxation arising due to spin-flip transitions accompanied by phonon emission in quantum dots where the strength of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling is a random function of the lateral (in-plane) coordinate on the spatial nanoscale. In this case the Rashba contribution to the spin-orbit coupling cannot be completely removed by applying a uniform external bias across the quantum dot plane. Due to the remnant random contribution, the spin relaxation rate cannot be decreased by more than two orders of magnitude even when the external bias fully compensates the regular part of the spin-orbit coupling.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure