# Influence of the confinement geometry on surface superconductivity

## Abstract

The nucleation field for surface superconductivity, $`H_{c3}`$, depends on the geometrical shape of the mesoscopic superconducting sample and is substantially enhanced with decreasing sample size. As an example we studied circular, square, triangular and wedge shaped disks. For the wedge the nucleation field diverges as $`H_{c3}/H_{c2}=\sqrt{3}/\alpha `$ with decreasing angle ($`\alpha `$) of the wedge, where $`H_{c2}`$ is the bulk upper critical field.

PACS numbers: 74.80-g, 74.20De, 75.25Dw

Recent progress in microfabrication techniques has made it possible to study mesoscopic superconducting samples of micronmeter and submicronmeter dimensions. The size and shape of such samples strongly influences the superconducting properties. Whereas bulk superconductivity exists at low magnetic field (either the Meissner state for $`H<H_{c1}`$ in type-I and type-II superconductors or the Abrikosov vortex state for $`H_{c1}<H<H_{c2}`$ in type-II superconductors), surface superconductivity survives in infinitely large bounded samples up to the third critical field $`H_{c3}1.695H_{c2}`$.

For mesoscopic samples of different shape, whose characteristic sizes are comparable to the coherence length $`\xi `$, recent experiments  have demonstrated the Little-Parks-type  oscillatory behavior of the phase boundary between the normal and superconducting state in the $`HT`$ plane, where $`T`$ and $`H`$ are the critical temperature and the applied magnetic field, respectively. While for a circular sample, when the superconductor state is characterized by a definite angular momentum, the ocsillatory behavior of the nucleation field is well understood theoretically , the problem of the nucleation of superconductivity in arbitrary shaped systems is still to be solved.

Earlier numerical calculations by the present authors showed that the oscillations of the nucleation field with sample size for ellipsoidal and rectangular shaped samples disappears only for large aspect ratios. Recently, the asymptotic behavior of the nucleation field in the small size limit, $`L\xi `$, and in the large size limit, $`L\xi `$, where $`L`$ is the characteristic sample size, was found for smooth (i.e. without sharp corners) and square samples . The particular case of surface superconductivity in a rectangular loop  and in a wedge  was investigated recently. In Ref.  a variational approach was used and they found that $`H_{c3}`$ is maximum for a wedge angle of $`\alpha =0.44\pi `$. This is surprising in view of the intuitive idea that surface superconductivity increases with decreasing size of the system and therefore, one would expect that $`H_{c3}`$ is an uniform increasing function with decreasing $`\alpha `$. The result of Ref.  was also in disagreement with calculations  for the particular case of a square sample.

In the present paper, we calculate, within the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) mean field approach, the nucleation field for bounded square and triangular samples as well as for a wedge with infinitely long sides and arbitrary corner angle $`\alpha `$. We resolve the discrepancy between the results of Refs.  and . Furthermore, we obtain the following analytical expression for the asymptotic behavior of the nucleation field of a wedge $`H_{c3}/H_{c2}=\sqrt{3}/\alpha `$ in the limiting case of $`\alpha 1`$.

Nucleation of superconductivity in a finite bounded sample. Close to the superconducting - normal transition the demagnetization effects are not important and consequently the nucleation of superconductivity is described by the first GL equation for the order parameter $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$

$$\frac{1}{2m^{}}\left(i\mathrm{}\stackrel{}{}\frac{e^{}}{c}\stackrel{}{A}\right)^2\mathrm{\Psi }=\alpha \mathrm{\Psi }\beta \mathrm{\Psi }|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2,$$
(1)   
where $`\alpha `$, $`\beta `$ are the GL parameters which depend on temperature, $`\stackrel{}{A}`$ is the vector potential of the applied magnetic field $`\stackrel{}{H}=rot\stackrel{}{A}`$ and $`m^{}=2m`$ and $`e^{}=2e`$ are the mass and electrical charge of the Cooper pairs, respectively. We consider a uniform external magnetic field applied along the $`z`$axis and assume that the order parameter is uniform in this direction. The latter is satisfied for samples which are close to the nucleation field and which have flat top and bottom sides. When calculating the nucleation field we neglect the nonlinear term and rewrite Eq. (1) as

$$\left(i\stackrel{}{}\stackrel{}{A}\right)^2\mathrm{\Psi }=\mathrm{\Psi },$$
(2)   
where the distance is measured in units of the coherence length $`\xi =\mathrm{}/\sqrt{2m\alpha }`$, the vector potential in $`c\mathrm{}/2e\xi `$, and the magnetic field in $`H_{c2}=c\mathrm{}/2e\xi ^2`$, the bulk upper critical field.

Thus the problem of nucleation of superconductivity is reduced to the calculation of the lowest eigenvalue and corresponding eigenfunction of the two-dimensional (2D) linear operator $`\widehat{L}=(i\stackrel{}{}\stackrel{}{A})^2`$ which also describes the motion of a quantum particle. The transition from the normal to the superconducting state occurs when the lowest eigenvalue of $`\widehat{L}`$ becomes smaller than unity. Contrary to the case of the usual Schrödinger equation, where the wave function is taken equal to zero at the sample boundaries, here the normal component of the superconducting current must be zero at the boundary between the superconducting and the insulating material

$$\left(i\stackrel{}{}\stackrel{}{A}\right)|_n\mathrm{\Psi }=0.$$
(3)   
This difference in boundary condition changes drastically the behavior of the eigenvalues as function of the sample size. Whereas the energy of a quantum particle increases as $`E1/L^2`$ for decreasing sample size $`L`$, the resulting energy for the boundary condition Eq. (3) decreases as $`EL^2`$. As a result the nucleation field decreases with increasing sample size and tends to the limit $`H_{c3}=1.695H_{c2}`$ for infinitely large samples with a flat boundary. In circular samples this increase of $`H_{c3}`$ with decreasing sample size has an oscillatory behavior due to the quantization of the angular momentum. For axially symmetric samples the latter is an exact quantum number

To find the nucleation field for an arbitrary shaped sample we use a finite-difference representation of the differential operator $`\widehat{L}`$ on a uniform Cartesian space grid within the link variable approach . The lowest eigenvalue and corresponding order parameter are found by applying the following iteration procedure $`\widehat{L}\mathrm{\Psi }^i=\mathrm{\Psi }^{i1}`$. The calculated nucleation field as a function of the square root of the sample area is shown in Fig. 1 for different geometries. Note, that the oscillatory behavior of the nucleation field survives even in triangular samples although the oscillations are less pronounced then for a circular geometry. The contour plots of the order parameter density $`|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2`$ are depicted in the insets of Fig. 1 for two square samples with different sizes. For smaller samples areas $`S=(2.32\xi )^2`$, the maximum of the order parameter is situated in the center of the square, which corresponds to the Meissner state (see upper inset of Fig. 1). The jump in the first derivative of the nucleation field at $`\sqrt{S}2.33\xi `$ is caused by the appearance of a vortex in the center of the square (see lower inset of Fig. 1). This changes the slope of the nucleation field and corresponds to the appearance of a vortex state with a larger value of the angular momentum. The existence of a sequence of vortex-like states is inherent to all considered samples. Notice also that the nucleation field is larger for samples with sharper corners as expected intuitively.

The nucleation of superconductivity in a wedge. For the wedge geometry it is more convenient to use cylindrical coordinates ($`\rho `$,$`\varphi `$) with $`A_\varphi =H\rho ^2/2`$ and to measure all distances in $`\sqrt{c\mathrm{}/eH}`$. Then the linearized first GL equation takes the form:

$$\frac{1}{\rho }\frac{}{\rho }\rho \frac{\mathrm{\Psi }}{\rho }+\frac{1}{\rho ^2}\left(\frac{}{\varphi }i\rho ^2\right)^2\mathrm{\Psi }=\frac{2H_{c2}}{H}\mathrm{\Psi },$$
(4)   
with the boundary conditions

$$\left(\frac{}{\varphi }i\rho ^2\right)\mathrm{\Psi }|_{\varphi =0,\alpha }=0,\frac{\mathrm{\Psi }}{\rho }|_\rho \mathrm{}=0.$$
(5)   
The nucleation field $`H_{c3}=2H_{c2}/\lambda `$ is obtained from the lowest eigenvalue $`\lambda `$ of the operator in the LHS of Eq. (4). In order to find the lowest eigenvalue and the corresponding eigenfunction we use again the finite-difference technique described above. Instead of an infinitely long wedge we consider a finite fragment with a very large radius $`R=15/\sqrt{\alpha }`$ such that the value for $`\lambda `$ is independent of $`R`$. Fig. 2 shows the spatial distribution of the square of the absolute value of the order parameter $`|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2`$ for two different wedge angles $`\alpha =0.05\pi `$ and $`0.5\pi `$. For the $`\alpha =0.05\pi `$ case, the order parameter practically does not depend on the azimuthal angle and decays faster then exponentially deep into the sample. For $`\alpha =\pi /2`$, the order parameter still decays quickly with the radius but a prominent angular dependence appears, specially for large radii. This expected behavior, namely superconductivity only exists in the corner , implies a decay of the order parameter from the wedge side into the sample.

The numerically obtained nucleation field is shown in Fig. 3 by the solid curve which decreases monotonically with increasing wedge angle and diverges in the limit $`\alpha 0`$. For $`\alpha =\pi /2`$, we found $`H_{c3}1.96H_{c2}`$ which is close to the estimated result $`H_{c3}1.82H_{c2}`$ of . Note, that increasing the wedge angle beyond $`\alpha >\pi /2`$ changes very weakly the nucleation field and we found the well-known result $`H_{c3}=1.695H_{c2}`$ for $`\alpha =\pi `$ .

Because the order parameter varies only weakly with the angle it allows us to find the asymptotic behavior of the order parameter analytically for small wedge angles $`\alpha 1`$. To this end we rewrite Eqs. (4,5) as

$$e^{ix^2\eta }\frac{1}{x}\frac{}{x}x\frac{}{x}e^{ix^2\eta }\psi \frac{1}{x^2\alpha ^2}\frac{^2\psi }{\eta ^2}=\mu \psi ,$$
(6)   
with the boundary condition

$$\frac{\psi }{\eta }|_{\eta =0,1}=0,$$
(7)   
where $`x=\sqrt{\alpha }\rho `$, $`\eta =\varphi /\alpha `$, $`\mu =\lambda /\alpha `$, $`\psi =exp(ix^2\eta )\mathrm{\Psi }`$ . The second term in the LSH of Eq. (6) dominates for the case of very small wedge angles. Therefore, the new order parameter $`\psi `$ depends slightly on the angle $`\eta `$ which is also in agreement with the boundary condition (7). This allows to simplify the problem. Using the boundary condition (7) we integrate Eq. (6) over $`\eta `$ assuming that $`\psi `$ depends only on the radius and obtain

$$\frac{^2\psi }{x^2}(\frac{1}{x}+2ix)\frac{\psi }{x}(2i\frac{4x^2}{3})\psi =\mu \psi .$$
(8)   
Note, that the wedge angle does not enter into the last equation and the reduced eigenvalue $`\mu `$ does not depend on $`\alpha `$. After the substitution $`\psi (x)=exp(ix^2/2)f(x)`$ Eq. (8) is reduced to the well-known equation for the harmonic oscillator with the lowest eigenvalue $`\mu =2/\sqrt{3}`$. Thus the order parameter for sharp wedges $`\alpha 1`$ can be written as

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=exp\left((i\varphi i\frac{\alpha }{2}\frac{\alpha }{2\sqrt{3}})\rho ^2\right),$$
(9)   
and the nucleation field is inversly proportional to the wedge angle

$$H_{c3}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{\alpha }H_{c2}.$$
(10)   
Our numerical results deviates from the asymptotic expression (10) with about $`10\%`$ when the wedge angle is increased up to $`\alpha 0.15\pi 0.5`$ (compare the dashed curve with the solid curve in Fig. 3). As is evident from Eq. (6), the corrections to the above asymptotic nucleation field are of second order $`O(\alpha ^2)`$. From this observation we tried to fit $`H_{c3}/H_{c2}`$ to a function $`g(\alpha ^2)\sqrt{3}/\alpha `$. Within the accuracy of our numerical results we found that the nucleation field for a wedge could be accurately fitted to

$$\frac{H_{c3}}{H_{c2}}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{\alpha }\left(1+0.14804\alpha ^2+\frac{0.746\alpha ^2}{\alpha ^2+1.8794}\right).$$
(11)   
This function is shown by the dotted curve in Fig. 3 and agrees very well with our numerical results (solid curve).

Let us compare the asymptotic result for the nucleation field in a wedge with those for thin strips and small circles. Assuming that the order parameter depends slightly on the width $`d`$ of the strip and on the radius $`R`$ of the circle, we find the following asymptotic expressions for the nucleation field in the strip $`H_{c3}=\sqrt{3}H_{c2}\xi /d`$ and the circle $`H_{c3}=2\sqrt{2}H_{c2}\xi /R`$. In conlusion, for $`L\xi `$, where $`L`$ is the smallest dimension of the sample, the nucleation field increases inversely with the sample size, which corresponds to $`\alpha \xi `$ in the case of a wedge-like sample.

Note added in proof: The authors of Ref.  recently found a mistake in their calculation which was corrected in the erratum . The new asymptotic behavior found with their variational calculation is $`H_{c3}/H_{c2}=\sqrt{2/3}/\alpha =0.816/\alpha `$ which is a factor $`3/\sqrt{2}=2.12`$ smaller than our exact result (10).

We acknowledge discussions with J.T. Devreese and V.V. Moshchalkov. This work was supported by the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO-Vl) and IUAP-VI. FMP is a research director with the FWO-Vl.