Anisotropic Magnetoconductance in Quench-Condensed Ultrathin Beryllium Films

Abstract

Near the superconductor-insulator (S-I) transition, quench-condensed ultrathin Be films show a large magnetoconductance which is highly anisotropic in the direction of the applied field. Film conductance can drop as much as seven orders of magnitude in a weak perpendicular field (< 1 T), but is insensitive to a parallel field in the same field range. We believe that this negative magnetoconductance is due to the field de-phasing of the superconducting pair wavefunction. This idea enables us to extract the finite superconducting phase coherence length in nearly superconducting films. Our data indicate that this local phase coherence persists even in highly insulating films in the vicinity of the S-I transition.

4 pages, 4 figure RevTex, Typos Corrected

References in corpus (3)

• Intrinsic Decoherence in Mesoscopic Systems
• Dissipation effects on the superconductor-insulator transition in 2-D superconductors
• Thickness-Magnetic Field Phase Diagram at the Superconductor-Insulator Transition in 2D

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• Cooper pairs under the action of disorder and strong magnetic field