GEOMETRIC BARRIER EFFECTS ON TRI-DIMENSIONAL SUPERCONDUCTING STRIPES WITH RANDOM PINNING

Abstract

We study the behavior of tri-dimensional driven vortex lattices in highly anisotropic superconducting materials such as BSCCO with random distribution of impurities (pinning centers). We consider a narrow stripe, finite in the transversal direction and infinite in the longitudinal one, composed by a stack of bi-dimensional layers. Our numerical simulations are made using molecular dynamics techniques with periodic boundary conditions in the direction the stripe is infinite and a surface barrier in the direction it is finite. The equation of motion includes in-plane and inter-plane pancake vortex interactions, vortex interaction with the screening current, vortex images, transport current and random distributed pinning centers. We could distinguish among three different dynamical regimes as observed in previous works, but with differences in the vortex trajectories and an increase in the critical current due to the geometric barrier effects.