2005/12/13 by Paul H. Barsic, Oriol T. Valls, Klaus Halterman · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Magnetic properties of thin films #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.73.144514
published as Phys. Rev. B73, 144514 (2006) · 4 pages including 3 figures. RevTeX
arxiv created 2005/12/13 · openalex publication_date 2006/04/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the thermodynamics of clean structures composed of superconductor (S) and ferromagnet (F) layers and consisting of one or more SFS junctions. We use fully self-consistent numerical methods to compute the condensation free energies of the possible order parameter configurations as a function of temperature T. As T varies, we find that there are phase transitions between states characterized by different junction configurations (denoted as ``0'' or ``\ensuremathπ'' according to the phase difference of the order parameter in consecutive S layers). We show that these transitions are of first order. We calculate the associated latent heats and find them to be measurable.