Fluctuation spectroscopy: From Rayleigh-Jeans waves to Abrikosov vortex clusters

A. A. Varlamov, A. Galda, and A. Glatz
Rev. Mod. Phys. 90, 015009 – Published 27 March 2018
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Abstract

Superconducting (SC) fluctuations, discovered in the late 1960s, have constituted an important research area in superconductivity as they are manifest in a variety of phenomena. Indeed, the underlying physics of SC fluctuations makes it possible to elucidate the fundamental properties of the superconducting state. The interest in SC fluctuation phenomena was further enhanced with the discovery of cuprate high-temperature superconductors (HTSs). In these materials, superconducting fluctuations appear over a wide range of temperatures due to the superconductors extremely short coherence lengths and low effective dimensionality of the electron systems. These strong fluctuations lead to anomalous properties of the normal state in some HTS materials. Within the framework of the phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau theory, and more extensively in the diagrammatic microscopic approach based on BCS theory, SC fluctuations as well as other quantum contributions (weak localization, etc.) enabled a new way to investigate and characterize disordered electron systems, granular metals, Josephson structures, artificial superlattices, and others. The characteristic feature of SC fluctuations is its strong dependence on temperature and magnetic field in the vicinity of the superconducting phase transition. This dependence allows the separation of fluctuation effects from other contributions and provides information about the microscopic parameters of a material, in particular, the critical temperature and the zero-temperature critical magnetic field. As such, SC fluctuations are very sensitive to the relaxation processes that break phase coherence and can be used as a versatile characterization instrument for SCs: Fluctuation spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the properties of superconducting systems on a quantitative level. Here the physics of SC fluctuations is reviewed, commencing from a qualitative description of thermodynamic fluctuations close to the critical temperature and quantum fluctuations at zero temperature in the vicinity of the second critical field. The analysis of the latter allows us to present fluctuation formation as a fragmentation of the Abrikosov lattice. This review highlights a series of experimental findings followed by microscopic description and numerical analysis of the effects of fluctuations on numerous properties of superconductors in the entire phase diagram and beyond the superconducting phase.

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  • Received 28 March 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.90.015009

© 2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

A. A. Varlamov

  • CNR-SPIN (Istituto Superconduttori, Materiali Innovativi e Dispositivi), Viale del Politecnico 1, I-00133, Rome, Italy

A. Galda

  • James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA and Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 South Cass Avenue, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA

A. Glatz

  • Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 South Cass Avenue, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA and Department of Physics, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115, USA

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Vol. 90, Iss. 1 — January - March 2018

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