Thursday,
November 19, 2009 - 4:00 P.M., NSH 184
Superconducting/Ferromagnetic (S/F) hybrid systems exhibit a number of interesting properties due to the interplay between the competing symmetries of their order parameters. With conventional spin-singlet superconductors, the proximity effect in S/F systems decays over an extremely short length scale in the ferromagnet due to the large exchange splitting between the spin-up and spin-down electron bands. In S/F/S Josephson junctions, the critical current oscillates and decays rapidly as a function of the ferromagnetic layer thickness. If there were spin-triplet superconducting correlations present, however, then both the proximity and Josephson effects would persist over much longer distances. Such correlations have been predicted to occur in S/F systems with certain forms of magnetic heterogeneity near the S/F interface. In this talk I will discuss our efforts to produce and measure these elusive spin-triplet correlations in S/F/S Josephson junctions.