Extremely large and anisotropic upper critical field and the ferromagnetic instability in UCoGe

Magnetoresistivity measurements with fine tuning of the field direction on high quality single crystals of the ferromagnetic superconductor UCoGe show anomalous anisotropy of the upper critical field Hc2. Hc2 for H parallel b-axis (Hc2b) in the orthorhombic crystal structure is strongly enhanced with decreasing temperature with an S-shape and reaches nearly 20 T at 0 K. The temperature dependence of Hc2a shows upward curvature with a low temperature value exceeding 30 T, while Hc2c at 0 K is very small (∼0.6 T). Contrary to conventional ferromagnets, the decrease of the Curie temperature with increasing field for H parallel b-axis marked by an enhancement of the effective mass of the conduction electrons appears to be the origin of the S-shaped Hc2b curve. These results indicate that the field-induced ferromagnetic instability or magnetic quantum criticality reinforces superconductivity. (author)