Long-ranged superconductor proximity effects recently found in superconductorferromagnetic (S-F) systems are generally attributed to the formation of triplet-pairing correlations due to various forms of magnetic inhomogeneities at the S-F interface. In order to investigate this conjecture within a single F layer coupled to a superconductor, we performed scanning tunneling spectroscopy on bilayers of La2/3Ca1/3MnO3 (LCMO) ferromagnetic thin-films grown on high temperature superconducting films of YBa2Cu3O7- (YBCO) or Pr1.85Ca0.15CuO4 (PCCO) under various magnetic fields. We find a strong correlation between the magnitude of superconductor-related spectral features measured on the LCMO layer and the degree of magnetic inhomogeneity controlled by the external magnetic field. This corroborates theoretical predictions regarding the role played by magnetic inhomogeneities in inducing triplet-pairing at S-F interfaces.

In the search for Majorana fermions in proximity-induced topological superconducting junctions, we happened to find a signature of same-spin triplet superconductivity which appears to dominate these elusive elementary excitations. Thin-film junctions and bilayers of the doped topological insulator and the s-wave superconductor NbN exhibit conductance spectra with coexisting prominent zero-bias and coherence peaks. Various tunneling models with different pair potentials have failed to fit our data, except for the triplet pair potential, which breaks time-reversal symmetry, that yielded reasonably good fits. This provides supporting evidence for proximity-induced triplet superconductivity in the layer near the interface with the NbN film.

Measurements of conductance spectra in a superconductor -topological insulator -normal metal thin film junctions of NbN-Bi 2 Se 3 -Au are reported. Junctions with ex-situ and in-situ prepared NbN − Bi 2 Se 3 interfaces were studied. At low temperatures, all the ex-situ junctions showed coherence peaks in their conductance spectra, but imbedded robust zero bias conductance peaks were observed only in junctions with a metallic or a metal to insulator transition below T c of the NbN electrode. The in-situ junctions which had about two orders of magnitude lower resistance at low temperatures, generally showed flat conductance spectra at low bias, with no coherence or broad Andreev peaks, since the critical current of the NbN electrode was reached first, at voltage bias below the energy gap of the superconductor. A weak zero bias conductance peak however, was observed in one of these junctions. We conclude that significant tunneling barriers, as in the ex-situ prepared junctions, are essential for the observation of coherence peaks and the zero energy bound states. The later seem to originate in the Bi 2 Se 3 -NbN interface, as they are absent in reference Au-NbN junctions without the topological layer sandwiched in between.

The long range proximity effect in high-Tc c-axis Josephson junctions with a high-Tc barrier of lower Tc is still a puzzling phenomenon. It leads to supercurrents in junctions with much thicker barriers than would be allowed by the conventional proximity effect. Here we measured the T − x (Temperature-doping level) phase diagram of the barrier coherence length ξN(T, x), and found an enhancement of ξN at moderate under-doping and high temperatures. This indicates that a possible origin of the long range proximity effect in the cuprate barrier is the conjectured pre-formed pairs in the pseudogap regime, which increase the length scale over which superconducting correlations survive in the seemingly normal barrier. In more details, we measured the supercurrents Ic of Superconducting - Normal - Superconducting SNS c-axis junctions, where S was optimally doped Y Ba2Cu3O7−δ below Tc (90 K) and N was La2−xSrxCuO4 above its Tc (<25 K) but in the pseudogap regime. From the exponential decay of Ic(T) ∝ exp[−d/ξN(T)], where d is the barrier thickness, the ξN(T) values were extracted. By repeating these measurements for different barrier doping levels x, the whole phase diagram of ξN(T, x) was obtained.