Abstract
The authors show that rare events in the form of small defect clusters dominate the pinning of the vortex lattice in a superconductor in the intermediate regime between weak collective and strong pinning.
Highlights
Broken-symmetry phases, as they appear in superconducting, magnetic, or density wave systems, exhibit physical properties on top of those originating from the underlying material
We show that in a considerable part of the weak region, pinning is dominated by defect clusters cooperating on short distances and forming strong pinning centers that are described with the tools of strong pinning theory
We have extended the strong pinning paradigm into the weak pinning domain by accounting for correlations between defects
Summary
Broken-symmetry phases, as they appear in superconducting, magnetic, or density wave systems, exhibit physical properties on top of those originating from the underlying material. In the weak-collective pinning scenario, distant defects act with random forces on the manifold and their (random) addition within the Larkin volume Vc ∼ λ3(λ/a0)/(κ2npa0ξ 2) (that contains a large number of pins) produces a critical force density Fc ∼ [(ξ 2/a02 )np fp2Vc]1/2/Vc ∼ (ξ 2/λ2 )κ3(npa0ξ 2 ) np fp, where the factor ξ 2/a02 accounts for the fraction of defects within Vc that overlap with the vortex cores. The paper is organized as follows: in Sec. II, we discuss the formalism used in the description of vortex pinning for the generic case of an isotropic material and briefly present the main steps in the derivation of the pinning force density Fc in the strong and weak pinning scenarios and for the newly introduced framework of pinning by close pairs of defects. IV, we summarize our results and place them into context, including some further directions of research
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