Size effects in the nonlinear resistance and flux creep in a virtual Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless state of superconducting films

Abstract

We show that the size effects radically affect the electric field-current ($E-I$) relation of superconducting films. We calculate $E(J)$ due to thermally-activated hopping of single vortices driven by current $I$ across the film in a magnetic field $H$, taking into account interaction of free vortices with their antivortex images and peaks in the Meissner currents at the film edges. Unbinding of virtual vortex-antivortex pairs not only mimics the transport uniform BKT behavior, it can dominate the observed $E(J)$ and result in the field-dependent ohmic resistance at small $I$. We show that $E(I)$ can be tuned by changing the film geometry and propose experimental tests of this theory.

References in corpus (2)

• Electrostatic Modulation of the Superfluid Density in a Ultrathin La2-xSrxCuO4 Film
• Sine-Gordon description of Beresinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless physics at finite magnetic field

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Vortex-induced dissipation in narrow current-biased thin-film superconducting strips
• Evolution of superconducting correlations within magnetic-field-decoupled CuO(2) layers of La(1.905)Ba(0.095)CuO(4)
• Vortex dynamics induced by scanning SQUID susceptometry
• Frequency dispersion of nonlinear response of thin superconducting films in Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless state