Muon spin rotation studies of electronic excitations and magnetism in the vortex cores of superconductors

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on recent progress in muon spin rotation (muSR) studies of the vortex cores in type-II superconductors. By comparison of muSR measurements of the vortex core size in a variety of materials with results from techniques that directly probe electronic states, the effect of delocalized quasiparticles on the spatial variation of field in a lattice of interacting vortices has been determined for both single-band and multi-band superconductors. These studies demonstrate the remarkable accuracy of what some still consider an exotic technique. In recent years muSR has also been used to search for magnetism in and around the vortex cores of high-temperature superconductors. As a local probe muSR is specially suited for detecting static or quasistatic magnetism having short-range or random spatial correlations. As discussed in this review, muSR experiments support a generic phase diagram of competing superconducting and magnetic order parameters, characterized by a quantum phase transition to a state where the competing order is spatially nonuniform.

28 pages, 22 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Superfluid Density and Field-Induced Magnetism in Ba(Fe1-xCox)2As2 and Sr(Fe1-xCox)2As2 Measured with Muon Spin Relaxation
• Probing the superconducting ground state of the noncentrosymmetric superconductors CaTSi3 (T = Ir, Pt) using muon-spin relaxation and rotation
• High-$T_{\mathrm{c}}$ superconductivity in undoped ThFeAsN
• Search for broken time-reversal symmetry near the surface of YBCO films using Beta-NMR
• Superconducting gap structure in ambient-pressure-grown $\mathrm{La}{\mathrm{O}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{F}}_{0.5}\mathrm{Bi}{\mathrm{S}}_2$
• Landau Renormalizations of Superfluid density in Heavy Fermion Superconductor CeCoIn5
• Evaluating Superconductors through Current Induced Depairing
• Magnetic field distribution and characteristic fields of the vortex lattice for a clean superconducting niobium sample in an external field applied along a three-fold axis
• Abrikosov flux-lines in two-band superconductors with mixed dimensionality