Peak Effect in Superconductors: Melting of Larkin Domains

Abstract

Motivated by the recent observations of the peak effect in high-$T_c$ YBCO superconductors, we reexamine the origin of this unusual phenomenon. We show that the mechanism based on the $k$-dependence (nonlocality) of the vortex-lattice tilt modulus $C_{44}(\mathbf{k})$ cannot account for the essential feature of the peak effect. We propose a scenario in which the peak effect is related to the melting of Larkin domains. In our model, the rise of critical current with increasing temperature is a result of a crossover from the Larkin pinning length to the length scale set by thermally excited free dislocations.

arXiv comment13 pages, 2 figures, REVTEX

References in corpus (4)

• Elastic Theory of pinned flux lattices
• Two-Dimensional Vortex Lattice Melting
• Peak effect in twinned superconductors
• Vortex lattce melting in 2D superconductors and Josephson arrays

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