Decomposing the Bragg glass and the peak effect in a Type-II superconductor

Adding impurities or defects destroys crystalline order. Occasionally, however, extraordinary behaviour emerges that cannot be explained by perturbing the ordered state. One example is the Kondo effect, where magnetic impurities in metals drastically alter the temperature dependence of resistivity....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2018-03, Vol.9 (1), p.901-12, Article 901
Main Authors: Toft-Petersen, Rasmus, Abrahamsen, Asger B., Balog, Sandor, Porcar, Lionel, Laver, Mark
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/166/987
639/301/119/1003
639/766/119/1002
Critical current (superconductivity)
Crystal defects
Electrical resistivity
Electrons
Heavy metals
Humanities and Social Sciences
Impurities
Kondo effect
multidisciplinary
Neutron scattering
Neutrons
Order-disorder transformations
Phase transitions
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Superconductivity
Temperature dependence
Vanadium
Variation
Vortices
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Summary:Adding impurities or defects destroys crystalline order. Occasionally, however, extraordinary behaviour emerges that cannot be explained by perturbing the ordered state. One example is the Kondo effect, where magnetic impurities in metals drastically alter the temperature dependence of resistivity. In Type-II superconductors, disorder generally works to pin vortices, giving zero resistivity below a critical current j c . However, peaks have been observed in the temperature and field dependences of j c . This peak effect is difficult to explain in terms of an ordered Abrikosov vortex lattice. Here we test the widespread paradigm that an order-disorder transition of the vortex ensemble drives the peak effect. Using neutron scattering to probe the vortex order in superconducting vanadium, we uncover an order-disorder transition from a quasi-long-range-ordered phase to a vortex glass. The peak effect, however, is found to lie at higher fields and temperatures, in a region where thermal fluctuations of individual vortices become significant. The disordering of the vortex lattice in a type-II superconductor is widely perceived to underpin unusual peaks in the temperature and field dependence of critical current. By contrast, here Toft-Petersen et al. find an order-disorder transition in a superconducting vanadium sample that is unconnected with peaks observed in critical current.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-03267-z