Phase transitions in isotropic extreme type-ii superconductors

Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics

Volumn 59, Issue 21, 1999, Pages 14017-14022

  Chin, S K ^a   Nguyen, A K ^a   Sudbo A ^a  

^a NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY   (Norway)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 17044370467     PISSN: 10980121     EISSN: 1550235X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.59.14017     Document Type: Article

References (28)

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17. A similar quantity as (Formula presented) has previously been considered by E. A. Jagla and C. A. Balseiro, Phys. Rev. B 53, 538 (1996). These authors calculated the connectivity of a vortex tangle in a high-temperature superconductor and concluded that the connectivity changed as a result of a percolation transition taking place in the vortex lattice, considering systems that were much smaller than in the present paper. They did not attempt to identify any broken symmetry with the suggested transition, and concluded that this percolation transition was necessary in order to have dissipation in the c direction. However, as the present results show, and as the results of Ref. 6 show, it is not necessary to have a percolation transition to destroy longitudinal superfluidity. The change in (Formula presented) is preempted by the loss of longitudinal phase coherence and the onset of longitudinal dissipation. We believe that these results are a consequence of too short simulation times, possibly on too small systems. For finite-size effects on (Formula presented) see Fig. 2 of Ref. 6, where systems considerably larger than those of Jagla and Balseiro were considered.
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22. We thank J. S. Høye for helpful discussions on this point. A similar functional form for (Formula presented) involving the effective line tension, i.e., the free energy per unit length of a vortex line, is to our knowledge not available for the finite-field case and we have been unable to carry out a similar analysis when the field is nonzero.
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