Twofold Andreev reflections and coherent transport in ferromagnetic semiconductor/d-wave superconductor/ferromagnetic semiconductor double tunneling junctions

Abstract

Coherent transport in a ferromagnetic semiconductor (FS)/d-wave superconductor (SC)/FS structure with {110} interfaces is studied by extending Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation into eight components, in which the interband coupling of heavy and light hole bands in the FS, the strengths of potential scattering at the interfaces, and the mismatches in the effective mass and Fermi vector between the FS and SC are taken into account. Twofold Andreev reflections exist due to the existence of two bands in the FS, in which the incident hole and the two Andreev-reflected electrons, belonging to the different spin subbands, form twofold spin-singlet pairing states near the FS/SC interface. It is shown that due to the interplay of the SC with unconventional d-wave pairing symmetry and FS, the differential conductance and tunneling magnetoresistance exhibit an abundant dependence on not only the interband coupling in the FS but also the strengths of potential scattering at the interfaces. More importantly, the properties are found to be quite different from those in the FS/s-wave SC/FS structure with conventional pairing symmetry for the SC.