Crossed Andreev reflection at spin-active interfaces.pdf

a r X i v : 0 7 0 6 .3 5 7 5 v 2 [ c o n d - m a t .s u p r - c o n ] 8 D e c 2 0 0 7 Crossed Andreev reflection at spin-active interfaces Mikhail S. Kalenkov I.E. Tamm Department of Theoretical Physics, P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute, 119991 Moscow, Russia Andrei D. Zaikin Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Institut fu?r Nanotechnologie, 76021, Karlsruhe, Germany and I.E. Tamm Department of Theoretical Physics, P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute, 119991 Moscow, Russia With the aid of the quasiclassical Eilenberger formalism we develop a theory of non-local electron transport across three-terminal ballistic normal-superconducting-normal (NSN) devices with spin- active NS interfaces. The phenomenon of crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) is known to play the key role in such transport. We demonstrate that CAR is highly sensitive to electron spins and yields a rich variety of properties of non-local conductance which we describe non-perturbatively at arbitrary voltages, temperature, spin-dependent interface transmissions and their polarizations. Our results can be applied to multi-terminal hybrid structures with normal, ferromagnetic and half-metallic electrodes and can be directly tested in future experiments. I. INTRODUCTION Low energy electron transport in hybrid structures composed of a normal metal (N) and a superconduc- tor (S) is governed by Andreev reflection1 (AR) which causes non-zero subgap conductance2 of such structures. AR remains essentially a local effect provided there ex- ists only one NS interface in the system or, else, if the distance between different NS interfaces greatly exceeds the superconducting coherence length ξ. If, however, the distance L between two adjacent NS interfaces (i.e. the superconductor size) is smaller than (or compara- ble with) ξ, two additional non-local processes come into play (see Fig. 1). One such process corresponds to direct electron transfer between two N-metals through a super- conductor. Another process is the so-called