Magnetoelectric effect in the helical state of a superconductor/ferromagnet bilayer

Abstract

We study the microscopic mechanism of nucleation of the helical superconducting state maintained by a spin-splitting field and weak Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a 2D superconductor/ferromagnet system and present an exact solution for the Gor'kov equations, which provides a full description of the thermodynamic properties of the system under consideration. This permits us to obtain the Ginzburg-Landau expansion and use it to analyze the possibility of controlling magnetization using the transport supercurrent in both dc and quasistatic ac regimes. We show that these properties are related to the manifestation of the diode effect in superconducting systems with spin-orbit interaction.