On the effective activation energy due to flux avalanches in the Bean state

Abstract

We study the effective activation energy due to flux avalanches in the Bean critical state of dirty type-II superconductors. It is shown that such an activation energy, computed within a recently proposed framework combining thermally activated avalanches with a scaling hypothesis, cannot be reliably distinguished in relaxation experiments from activation energies derived from classical theories. We argue that this is true as the characteristic pinning barriers are large compared to temperature, and that it is also true in the other cases, owing to the rapid deay of the current density.