Controllable Rashba spin-orbit interaction in artificially engineered   superlattices involving the heavy-fermion superconductor CeCoIn5
  By using a molecular beam epitaxy technique, we fabricate a new type of superconducting superlattices with controlled atomic layer thicknesses of alternating blocks between heavy fermion superconductor CeCoIn_5, which exhibits a strong Pauli pair-breaking effect, and nonmagnetic metal YbCoIn_5. The introduction of the thickness modulation of YbCoIn_5 block layers breaks the inversion symmetry centered at the superconducting block of CeCoIn_5. This configuration leads to dramatic changes in the temperature and angular dependence of the upper critical field, which can be understood by considering the effect of the Rashba spin-orbit interaction arising from the inversion symmetry breaking and the associated weakening of the Pauli pair-breaking effect. Since the degree of thickness modulation is a design feature of this type of superlattices, the Rashba interaction and the nature of pair-breaking are largely tunable in these modulated superlattices with strong spin-orbit coupling. 
M. Shimozawa, S. K. Goh, R. Endo, R. Kobayashi, T. Watashige, Y.   Mizukami, H. Ikeda, H. Shishido, Y. Yanase, T. Terashima,...
cond-mat.supr-con cond-mat.str-el