Structural properties of confined vortex nanocrystals on cooling

KOLTON, A. B.; DOLZ, M. I.; FASANO, Y.; PASTORIZA, H.

Bariloche

Conferencia; Yielding phenomena in disordered systems; 2019

Poster: Decreasing the size of vortex crystals down to the nano-scale in extremely layered high-temperature superconductors produces a depletion of the total  binding energy of the system due to an enhancement of the vortex surface-to-volume ratio. As a consequence, the glassy-to-glassy transition line and the entropy-jump in the first-order melting line are affected by reducing the system size. In addition, the structural order of vortex nanocrystals are worsened with respect to the macroscopic case.  In order to better understand the role of confinement in these properties, we performed Langevin dynamics simulations of vortex nanocrystals nucleated in micro-sized disks of the high $T_{c}$ superconductor Bi2212. We study the quenching dynamics and the low-temperature structural properties of vortex nanocrystals nucleated in field cooling conditions for various vortex densities and cooling rates. In order to quantify the evolution of the structural properties we study the  radial density of topological defects when changing vortex density, cooling rate, and temperature and compare with data on real experimental systems of the same superconductor.