Universality of vortex avalanches in a type II superconductor with periodic pinning

Abstract

In this work the robustness of a simple cellular automaton developed by Bassler and Paczuski to describe the critical state in type-II superconductors is studied. Two different configurations of pinning centers are introduced and a new universality class is found. The numerical values of the critical exponents were calculated following two scaling techniques to ensure the validity of our results.

LaTex, 5 eps figures and submitted to Physica A. Revised version