Contribution to the study of the electric transport in cuprate superconducting thin films: supercritical currents and paraconductivity

Abstract

In type-II superconductors, in the regime of very high applied current density, an abrupt transition is experimentally observed from the mixed state to a highly dissipative regime, probably the normal state. This provokes a high voltage jump in the Current-Voltage Characteristics (CVC) of the samples, at a current density J* larger than the critical current Jc. In this work we study Y-123 (YBCO) microbridges sputtered over SrTiO3 substrates. We measure their CVCs for different temperatures close to Tc, and with low applied magnetic field, from 0 to 1 T. We compare the dependences of Jc and J*, and find that some of the typical experimental results in this regime could be explained by only considering the effect of the current self-field. This suggests that the depairing of the supercarriers could be involved in the abrupt transition. We also study the influence of thermal effects, by using a simplified model to describe the thermal evolution of our samples. We find that the uniform self-heating can produce an abrupt thermal runaway, at high current density, which could explain the occurrence of J*, as well as its dependence on temperature and applied magnetic field. These results do not totally exclude the implication of other more intrinsic mechanisms (like Cooper pairs depairing, or a change in the regime of the vortex dynamics), but suggest that the uniform self-heating is more relevant than what was considered up to now. In a shorter second part of the thesis, the contribution of the author to the study of the paraconductivity in his laboratory is reflected.