An alternative method for determination of the lock-in angle in twinned superconductors

Authors

S. Keshavarzi, University of WollongongFollow
J. Horvat, University of WollongongFollow
Alexey Pan, University of WollongongFollow
M. J. Qin, University of WollongongFollow
S. X. Dou, University of WollongongFollow
X. Yao, Shanghai Jiao University, China
P. Munroe, University of New South Wales

RIS ID

13373

Publication Details

This article was originally published as: Keshavarzi, S, Horvat, J, Pan, AV, Qin, MJ, Dou, SX, Yao, X & Munroe, P, An alternative method for determination of the lock-in angle in twinned superconductors, Journal of Applied Physics, 2006, 99(4), pp. 043904-1-043904-5, and can be found here. Copyright 2006 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics.

Abstract

An alternative method for determining the lock-in angle phiL for pinning of the vortices on extended defects has been developed. This method does not require any preassumed criterion for defining phiL. Highly twinned Sm1+xBa2–xCu3O6+y single crystal was used for demonstrating the method. Appropriate scaling of the hysteresis loops measured for different angles between the field and twin planes in highly twinned SmBaCuO single crystal led to a clear discrimination between two vortex dynamics regimes. From this scaling, the lock-in angle was determined to be 6°±0.1° for the single crystal investigated. This method significantly reduces the uncertainty in determining the lock-in angle when compared to all the other currently employed methods.