Fluxoid fluctuations in mesoscopic superconducting rings

Julie A. Bert, Nicholas C. Koshnick, Hendrik Bluhm, and Kathryn A. Moler
Phys. Rev. B 84, 134523 – Published 18 October 2011

Abstract

Superconducting rings represent an ideal system for studying phase coherence in one dimension. We study the temperature dependence of the magnetic susceptibility of superconducting rings with a scanning superconducting quantum interference device. The physical parameters of the rings were designed to reduce the superconducting phase stiffness. We observe a suppression of the susceptibility signal below the critical temperature, which we attribute to a thermodynamic sampling of metastable states with different phase winding number, termed fluxoid fluctuations. We introduce a simple model (N. C. Koshnick, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 2009) for the susceptibility of a ring affected by fluxoid fluctuations and compare it with one-dimensional (1D) Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory including all thermal fluctuations. We find good agreement between our fluxoid model and the full 1D GL theory up to a shift in the critical temperature. Additionally, our magnetic susceptibility data are well described by 1D GL theory.

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  • Received 27 August 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.84.134523

©2011 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Julie A. Bert, Nicholas C. Koshnick, Hendrik Bluhm*, and Kathryn A. Moler

  • Department of Physics and Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

  • *Present address: Department of Physics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen Germany.
  • kmoler@stanford.edu

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Issue

Vol. 84, Iss. 13 — 1 October 2011

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