Abstract
The effects of a strong magnetic field on superconducting Nb and MoGe nanowires with diameter have been studied. We have found that the Langer-Ambegaokar-McCumber-Halperin (LAMH) theory of thermally activated phase slips is applicable in a wide range of magnetic fields and describes well the temperature dependence of the wire resistance, over 11 orders of magnitude. The field dependence of the critical temperature, , extracted from the LAMH fits is in good quantitative agreement with the theory of pair-breaking perturbations that takes into account both spin and orbital contributions. The extracted spin-orbit scattering time agrees with an estimate , where is the elastic scattering time and is the atomic number.
- Received 8 June 2004
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.017004
©2005 American Physical Society