We show that a wide class of layered superconductor-ferromagnet (S/F) hybrids demonstrates the emergence of the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase well below the superconducting transition temperature. By decreasing the temperature, one can switch the system from uniform to the FFLO state which is accompanied by the damping of the diamagnetic Meissner response down to zero and also by the sign change in the curvature of the current-velocity dependence. Our estimates show that an additional layer of the normal metal (N) covering the ferromagnet substantially softens the conditions required for the predicted FFLO instability, and for existing S/F/N systems, the temperature of the transition into the FFLO phase can reach several kelvins.
We study the superfluid critical temperature in a two-band attractive Fermi system with strong pairing fluctuations associated with both interband and intraband couplings. We focus specifically on a configuration where the intraband coupling is varied from weak to strong in a shallow band coupled to a weakly-interacting deeper band. The whole crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) condensation of largely overlapping Cooper pairs to the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of tightly bound molecules is covered by our analysis, which is based on the extension of the Nozières-Schmitt-Rink (NSR) approach to a two-band system. In comparison with the single-band case, we find a strong enhancement of the critical temperature, a significant reduction of the preformed pair region where pseudogap effects are expected, and the entanglement of two kinds of composite bosons in the strong-coupling BEC regime.
In the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau approach, we present a self-consistent theory of specific soliton states in mesoscopic (thin-walled) two-band-superconducting cylinders in external parallel magnetic fields. Such states arise in the presence of "Josephson-type" interband coupling, when phase winding numbers are different for each component of the superconducting order parameter. We evaluate the Gibbs free energy of the sysyem up to second-order terms in a certain dimensionless parameter ε ≈ Lm L k ≪ 1, where Lm and L k are the magnetic and kinetic inductance, respectively. We derive the complete set of exact soliton solutions. These solutions are thoroughly analyzed from the viewpoint of both local and global (thermodynamic) stability. In particular, we show that rotational-symmetry-breaking caused by the formation of solitons gives rise to a zero-frequency rotational mode. Although soliton states prove to be thermodynamically metastable, the minimal energy gap between the lowest-lying single-soliton states and thermodynamically stable zero-soliton states can be much smaller than the magnetic Gibbs free energy of the latter states, provided that intraband "penetration depths" differ substantially and interband coupling is weak. The results of our investigation may apply to a wide class of mesoscopic doubly-connected structures exhibiting two-band superconductivity.
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