Spin-dependent transport properties through gapless graphene-based ferromagnet and gapped graphene-based superconductor junction

By depositing a superconductor on gapped graphene (graphene grown on SiC substrate), the motion of quasiparticles in this superconductor is explained by the massive Dirac equation. In this paper, we study the spin dependent transport properties of graphene-based ferromagnetic/insulator/superconductor (FIS) junction and graphene-based ferromagnetic/ferromagnetic barrier/superconductor (FFBS) junction in which only the superconducting region is deposited on the gapped graphene and the other graphene regions are gapless. We found that in the graphene-based FIS junction and in the thin barrier approximation, by opening the energy gap in the superconducting region, the charge conductance is an oscillatory function of barrier strength (chi(G)), despite the large Fermi energy mismatch between ferromagnetic and superconductor regions. As an important result, we analytically obtained that for the normal incident of charge carriers, this junction is not totally transparent. This means that the second characteristic of Klein tunneling is not satisfied due to the massive Dirac fermions carrying the current in the superconductor region. For the graphene-based FFBS junction, opening the energy gap causes a phase shift as large as pi/2 to appear between the peaks of charge conductance for parallel and antiparallel configuration versus chi(G). Interestingly, we obtained that by increasing the energy gap in this junction, the magnetoresistance increases and by approaching the energy gap to the Fermi energy of the superconductor, it reaches its maximum value (more than -150%). This characteristic shows that this junction can be a suitable candidate for application in the graphene-based spintronics devices. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4730631]