Abstract
Proliferation of topological defects like vortices and dislocations plays a key role in the physics of systems with long-range order, particularly, superconductivity and superfluidity in thin films, plasticity of solids, and melting of atomic monolayers. Topological defects are characterized by their topological charge reflecting fundamental symmetries and conservation laws of the system. Conservation of topological charge manifests itself in extreme stability of static topological defects because destruction of a single defect requires overcoming a huge energy barrier proportional to the system size. However, the stability of driven topological defects remains largely unexplored. Here we address this issue and investigate numerically a dynamic instability of moving vortices in planar arrays of Josephson junctions. We show that a single vortex driven by sufficiently strong current becomes unstable and destroys superconductivity by triggering a chain reaction of self-replicating vortex-antivortex pairs forming linear of branching expanding patterns. This process can be described in terms of propagating phase cracks in long-range order with far-reaching implications for dynamic systems of interacting spins and atoms hosting magnetic vortices and dislocations.
Highlights
Topological defects such as vortices or dislocations determine many key properties of systems with long-range order, including superconductivity, superfluidity, magnetism, liquid crystals, and plasticity of solids[1,2]
The issue of stability of driven topological defects becomes intriguing in 2D systems in which long-range order can be destroyed by the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition resulting from thermally-activated unbinding of V-AV pairs[28,29] or a superconductor-insulator transition in JJAs30,31 which
We addressed the behavior of driven topological defects by simulating Eqs (1–3) for a 50 × 100 array with periodic boundary conditions along y and open boundary conditions along x at the edges of the array
Summary
Topological defects such as vortices or dislocations determine many key properties of systems with long-range order, including superconductivity, superfluidity, magnetism, liquid crystals, and plasticity of solids[1,2]. Generic equations (1–3) can model dynamics of driven topological defects in many systems with long-range order, including artificial JJAs and granular superconducting films[30,31], magnetic vortices and domain walls described by a classical XY model[37], commensurate-incommensurate transitions and domain walls in charge density waves[38,39,40,41], or dislocations in crystals[36]. The 2D systems are special as they exhibit a continuous BKT transition due to unbinding of topological defects in equilibrium[28,29]
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