A team of researchers with members from several countries in Europe has used a type of X-ray diffraction to reveal defects in the way a superconductor develops. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes the technique they used to study one type of superconductor and what they saw. Erica Carlson with Perdue University offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the t...

Normal state bubble patterns in type I superconducting indium and lead slabs are studied by the high resolution magneto-optical imaging technique. The size of bubbles is found to be independent of the long-range interaction between the normal state domains. Under bubble diameter and slab thickness proper scaling, the results gather onto a single master curve. We calculate the equilibrium diamet...

Using the Ginzburg-Landau approach, we show that strain of nematic superconductor can generate a specific (nematic) vorticity. In case doped topological insulators vorticity forms spin vortex. We find two types topologically different vortices either enhance (type I) or suppress II) superconductivity far from vortex core. apply Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations to study electronic states in with ...

Lifting capacities greater than 41 N/cm2 (60 psi) at 77 K have been achieved using a combination of permanent magnets and high quality melt-textured YBa,Cu,O,-s (YBCO). The key concept of this hybrid superconducting magnetic bearing (HSMB) is the use of strong magnetic repulsion and attraction from permanent magnets to support high loads in conjunction with flux pinning in a type II superconduc...

The effect of smooth inhomogeneities near a superconductor boundary on the magnetic penetration depth λ is studied with emphasis on the proximity-induced spatial dependence of the Cooper pair amplitude. The influence of surface pair breaking or pair formation on λ is described within the Ginzburg-Landau theory, with no model assumptions, for both strongly type-II and strongly type-I homogeneous...

We obtain an effective string theory of the Abrikosov–Nielsen–Olesen vortices of the Abelian Higgs model. The theory has an anomaly free effective string action which, when the extrinsic curvature is set equal to zero, yields the Nambu–Goto action. This generalizes previous work in which a string representation was obtained in the London limit, where the magnitude of the Higgs field is fixed. V...

Double tunneling junctions of ferromagnet-superconductor-ferromagnet electrodes (FSF) show a jump in the conductance when a parallel magnetic field reverses the magnetization of one of the ferromagnetic electrodes. This change is generally attributed to the spin-valve effect or to pair breaking in the superconductor because of spin accumulation. In this paper it is shown that the Meservey-Tedro...

We study the effects of thermal fluctuations of gluons and the diquark pairing field on the superconducting-to-normal state phase transition in a three-flavor color superconductor, using the Ginzburg-Landau free energy. At high baryon densities, where the system is a type I superconductor, gluonic fluctuations, which dominate over diquark fluctuations, induce a cubic term in the Ginzburg-Landau...

– An extreme type II superconductor with internal insulating regions, namely cavities, is studied here. We find that the cavity-bearing superconductor has lower energy than the defectfree superconductor above a critical magnetic induction B∗ for insulating cavities but not for metallic ones. Using a numerical approach for the Ginzburg-Landau theory we compute and compare free energy densities f...

Resistively shunted junction dynamics is applied to the three-dimensional uniformly frustrated XY model with randomly perturbed couplings, as a model for driven steady states in a type-II superconductor with quenched point pinning. For a disorder strength p strong enough to produce a vortex glass in equilibrium, we map the phase diagram as a function of temperature T and uniform driving current...