Enhancement of pinning properties of superconducting thin films by graded pinning landscapes

Abstract

A graded distribution of pinning centers (antidots) in superconducting MoGe thin films has been investigated by magnetization and magneto-optical imaging. The pinning landscape has maximum density at the border, decreasing progressively towards the center. At high temperatures and low fields, where this landscape mimics the vortex distribution predicted by the Bean model, an increase of the critical current is observed. At low temperatures and fields, the superconducting performance of the non-uniform sample is also improved due to suppression of thermomagnetic avalanches. These findings emphasize the relevance of non-uniform pinning landscapes, so far experimentally unexplored, on the enhancement of pinning efficiency.

5 pages and 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Commensurability effects in superconducting Nb films with quasiperiodic pinning arrays
• Enhanced pinning and proliferation of matching effects in a superconducting film with a Penrose array of magnetic dots
• Magnetic flux pinning in superconductors with hyperbolic-tesselation arrays of pinning sites
• Enhancing the critical current in quasiperiodic pinning arrays below and above the matching magnetic flux

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