TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dobrovolskiy, Oleksandr V.
A1  - Huth, Michael
A1  - Šklovskij, Valerij Aleksandrovič
A1  - Vovk, Ruslan V.
T1  - Mobile fluxons as coherent probes of periodic pinning in superconductors
T2  - Scientific reports
N2  - The interaction of (quasi)particles with a periodic potential arises in various domains of science and engineering, such as solid-state physics, chemical physics, and communication theory. An attractive test ground to investigate this interaction is represented by superconductors with artificial pinning sites, where magnetic flux quanta (Abrikosov vortices) interact with the pinning potential U(r) = U(r + R) induced by a nanostructure. At a combination of microwave and dc currents, fluxons act as mobile probes of U(r): The ac component shakes the fluxons in the vicinity of their equilibrium points which are unequivocally determined by the local pinning force counterbalanced by the Lorentz force induced by the dc current, linked to the curvature of U(r) which can then be used for a successful fitting of the voltage responses. A good correlation of the deduced dependences U(r) with the cross sections of the nanostructures points to that pinning is primarily caused by vortex length reduction. Our findings pave a new route to a non-destructive evaluation of periodic pinning in superconductor thin films. The approach should also apply to a broad class of systems whose evolution in time can be described by the coherent motion of (quasi)particles in a periodic potential.
KW  - Superconducting properties and materials
KW  - Surfaces, interfaces and thin films
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45944
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-459444
SN  - 2045-2322
N1  - Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
VL  - 7
IS  - 1, Art. 13740
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
CY  - [London]
ER  -