Magnetic field induced emergent inhomogeneity in a superconducting film with weak and homogeneous disorder

Abstract

When a magnetic field is applied, the mixed state of a conventional Type II superconductor gets destroyed at the upper critical field Hc2, where the normal vortex cores overlap with each other. Here, we show that in the presence weak and homogeneous disorder the destruction of superconductivity with field follows a different route. Starting with a weakly disordered NbN thin film ( Tc ~ 9K ), we show that under the application of magnetic field the superconducting state becomes increasingly granular, where lines of vortices separate the superconducting islands. Consequently, phase fluctuations between these islands give rise to a field induced pseudogap phase, which has a gap in the electronic density of states but where the global zero resistance state is destroyed.

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References in corpus (13)

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Cited by in corpus (21)

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• Fractionalized pair density wave in the pseudo-gap phase of cuprate superconductors
• Bosonic topological insulator intermediate state in the superconductor-insulator transition
• Vortex phase diagram and the normal state of cuprates with charge and spin orders
• Upper critical field and superconductor-metal transition in ultrathin niobium films
• Effect of dimensionality on the vortex-dynamics in type-II superconductor
• Quantum criticality at the superconductor insulator transition probed by the Nernst effect
• Self-consistent-field ensembles of disordered Hamiltonians: Efficient solver and application to superconducting films
• Evidence of zero point fluctuation of vortices in a very weakly pinned a-MoGe thin film
• Size dependent nature of the magnetic-field driven superconductor-to-insulator quantum-phase transitions
• Superconductivity in a disordered metal with Coulomb interactions
• Robust pseudogap across the magnetic field driven superconductor to insulator-like transition in strongly disordered NbN films
• Low frequency electrodynamics in the mixed state of superconducting NbN and a-MoGe films using two-coil mutual inductance technique
• Distribution of the order parameter in strongly disordered superconductors: An analytic theory
• On the dilemma between percolation processes and fluctuating pairs as the origin of the enhanced conductivity above the superconducting transition in cuprates
• Exploring the vortex phase diagram of Bogoliubov-de Gennes disordered superconductors
• Vortex Pinning in Niobium covered by a thin polycrystalline Gold
• Advanced approach of superconducting gap function extraction from tunneling experiments
• Proximitized insulators from disordered superconductors
• Uniformly frustrated XY model: strengthening of the vortex lattice by intrinsic disorder