Skip to content

Evaporation of the pancake-vortex lattice in weakly-coupled layered superconductors

M. J. W. Dodgson, A. E. Koshelev, V. B. Geshkenbein, G. Blatter

cond-mat.supr-conarXiv:cond-mat/9911439

Abstract

We calculate the melting line of the pancake-vortex system in a layered superconductor, interpolating between two-dimensional (2D) melting at high fields and the zero-field limit of single-stack evaporation. Long-range interactions between pancake vortices in different layers permit a mean-field approach, the ``substrate model'', where each 2D crystal fluctuates in a substrate potential due to the vortices in other layers. We find the thermal stability limit of the 3D solid, and compare the free energy to a 2D liquid to determine the first-order melting transition and its jump in entropy.

Create a lesson