Dissipation of moving vortices in thin films

Abstract

Moving vortices in thin superconducting films are considered within the time-dependent London description. The dissipation due to out-of-core normal excitations for two vortices moving together turns out to have a minimum for the separation vector $\bm a$ parallel to the velocity and equal to $a_m \approx 2.2\, \Lambda$, where $\Lambda $ is the Pearl length. The minimum entropy production suggests that moving vortices should have a tendency to form chains along the velocity with a period of the order $a_m$.