# Electric Field Induced Converse Piezoeffect in Screw Dislocated 𝑌⁢𝐵⁢𝑎₂⁢𝐶⁢𝑢₃⁢𝑂_{7-𝛿} Thin Films

Recent experimental results on electric-field induced critical current enhancement in screw dislocated high-$`T_c`$ thin films<sup>1,2</sup> have been treated as evidence for the field-induced modulation of the mobile charge carriers density<sup>3-5</sup>. Since high-$`T_c`$ superconductors (HTS) is supposed to have a rather low concentration of carriers, one could expect the field effects to be quite pronounced in these materials. However, even in extremely thin films (of a few unit cells thick), a rather large breakdown voltage (of 20-30$`V`$) is required to produce an essential modulation of the charge carrier density, and thus to substantially enhance the critical currents<sup>1-5</sup>. At the same time, the use of the sputtering technique as well as a laser ablation to prepare thin enough HTS films was found<sup>6-8</sup> to bring about a tremendous density of numerous extended defects (such as screw and edge dislocations) in these thin films. It is worthwhile to mention that dislocation-induced pinning force enhancement in zero electric field has been observed earlier practically for the same thin films<sup>7</sup>. On the other hand, it is well-known<sup>9,10</sup> that in ionic crystals dislocations can accumulate (or trap, due to the electric field around their cores) electrical charge along their length. Then, application of an external electric field, in the geometry similar to that used in the so-called ”superconducting field-effect transistor” (SuFET) devices<sup>1-5</sup>, can sweep up these additional carriers, refreshing the dislocation cores, that is releasing the dislocation from a cloud of point charges (which, in field-free configuration, screen an electric field of the dislocation line for electrical neutrality). Utilizing the ionic (perovskite-like) nature of the HTS crystals<sup>11</sup>, in the present paper a possibility of the electric field induced converse piezoeffect and its influence on the critical currents enhancement in screw dislocated YBCO thin films is discussed.

As is well-known<sup>8-10</sup>, the charges on dislocations play a rather important role in charge transfer in ionic crystals. If a dislocation is oriented so that it has an excess of ions of one sign along its core, or if some ions of predominantly one sign are added to or removed from the end of half-plane, the dislocation will be charged. In thermal equilibrium it would be surrounded by a cloud of point defects of the opposite sign to maintain electrical neutrality. A screw dislocation can transport charge normal to the Burgers vector if it can carry vacancies with it. Piezoelectric effect, that is a transverse polarization induced by dislocation motion in ionic crystals, is certainly cannot be responsible for large field-induced effects in YBCO thin films because of too low rate of dislocation motion at the temperatures used in these experiments (another possibility to observe the direct piezoeffect in dislocated crystals is to apply an external stress field<sup>9</sup>). On the contrary, the converse piezoeffect, i.e., a change of dislocation-induced strain field in applied electric field can produce a rather considerable change of the critical current density in screw dislocated HTS thin films. Indeed, according to McElfresh et al.<sup>8</sup> (who treated the correlation of surface topography and flux pinning in YBCO thin films), the strain field of a dislocation can provide a mechanism by which the superconducting order parameter can be reduced, making it a possible site for core pinning. The elastic pinning mechanism could also be responsible for the large pinning forces associated with dislocation defects. There are two types of elastic pinning mechanisms possible, a first-order (parelastic) interaction and a second-order (dielastic) interaction. In the case of a screw plane defect, the parelastic pinning can be shown to be negligible<sup>8</sup>. However, the dielastic interaction comes about because the self-energy of a defect depends on the elastic constants of the material in which it forms. Since the crystalline material in a vortex core is stiffer, there is a higher energy bound up in the defect. For a tetragonal system with a screw dislocation, the energy density due to the defect strain is $`(1/2)C_{44}ϵ_{44}^2`$, where $`C_{44}`$ is the shear modulus and $`ϵ_{44}`$ is the shear strain. For a screw plane, $`ϵ_{44}=b/2\pi r`$, where $`r`$ is the distance from the center of the defect and $`b`$ is the Burgers vector of the defect. The interaction energy density between the vortex and the screw plane is just $`(1/2)\delta C_{44}ϵ_{44}^2`$, where $`\delta C_{44}`$ is the difference in shear modulus between superconducting and normal regions. For a vortex a distance $`r`$ away from the defect, the interaction energy and the pinning force (per unit length) read, respectively<sup>8</sup>

$$_d(r)=\frac{1}{2}\delta C_{44}ϵ_{44}^2(\pi \xi ^2)$$
(1)   
and

$$_p\frac{d_d}{dr}=\delta C_{44}\left(\frac{b^2\xi ^2}{4\pi r^3}\right)$$
(2)   
Taking the recently reported for YBCO values of $`C_{44}=8\times 10^{10}N/m^2`$ and $`\delta C_{44}=10^5C_{44}`$, setting $`r=\xi `$ and using a value of $`b=12\times 10^{10}m`$, the authors of Ref.8 obtained a pinning force per unit length to be $`_p=10^4N/m`$, which corresponds to a critical current density of $`J_c=5\times 10^{10}A/m^2`$ using the single vortex limit, $`_p=J_c\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$. These estimates reasonably agree with the $`J_c`$ found recently in dislocated YBCO thin films<sup>1,7</sup>. Turning to the field-induced SuFET-type experiments<sup>1-5</sup>, we argue that an applied electric field can essentially modify the shear strain field of dislocation

$$ϵ_{44}(\stackrel{}{E})=ϵ_{44}(0)+\delta ϵ_{44}(\stackrel{}{E}),$$
(3)   
where the change of the dislocation-induced strain field in the applied electric field $`\stackrel{}{E}`$ is defined as follows<sup>9</sup>

$$\delta ϵ_{44}(\stackrel{}{E})=\stackrel{}{d}_{44}ϵ_0ϵ_r\stackrel{}{E}=d_{44}ϵ_0ϵ_rE\mathrm{cos}\theta $$
(4)   
Here, $`d_{44}`$ is the absolute value of the converse piezoeffect coefficient, $`\theta `$ stands for the angle between the screw dislocation line and the direction of an applied electric field, $`ϵ_r`$ is the static permittivity which takes account of the long-range polarization of the dislocated crystal, and $`ϵ_0=8.85\times 10^{12}F/m`$.

In view of Eqs.(1)-(4), field-induced converse piezoeffect results in the following changes of the interaction energy $`_d`$ and the pinning force density $`_p`$, respectively

$$_d(\stackrel{}{E})=\frac{1}{2}\left[1+2\frac{\delta ϵ_{44}(\stackrel{}{E})}{ϵ_{44}(0)}\right]\delta C_{44}ϵ_{44}^2(0)(\pi \xi ^2)$$
(5)   
and

$$_p(\stackrel{}{E})=_p(0)\left(1+\frac{\stackrel{}{E}}{E_0}\mathrm{cos}\theta \right)$$
(6)   
where

$$E_0=\frac{1}{ϵ_0ϵ_rd_{44}}$$
(7)   
and $`_p(0)`$ denotes the pinning force density at zero electric field (see Eq.(2)). According to Whitworth<sup>9</sup>, the converse piezoeffect coefficient $`d_{44}`$ in ionic dislocated crystals can be presented in the form

$$\frac{1}{d_{44}}=q\rho b$$
(8)   
Here $`\rho `$ is the dislocation density,and $`q=e^{}/L`$ is the effective electron charge $`e^{}`$ per unit length of dislocation $`L`$ (in fact, $`L`$ coincides with the thickness of the YBCO films<sup>1</sup>).

To attribute the above-mentioned mechanism to the field-induced changes of the critical current densities in dislocated YBCO thin films, we propose the following scenario. Depending on the gate polarity, a strong applied electric field will result either in trapping the additional point charges by dislocation cores (when $`\mathrm{cos}\theta =1`$) reducing the pinning force density, or in sweeping these point charges (surrounding the dislocation line to neutralize the net charge) up of the dislocation core (for the opposite polarity when $`\mathrm{cos}\theta =+1`$), thus increasing the core vortex pinning by fresh dislocation line. To make our consideration more definite, we assume that the total critical current density $`J_c`$ consists of two main contributions, the core pinning term $`J_{cm}`$ which has the usual form of $`J_{cm}=\mathrm{\Phi }_0/16\pi \mu _0\xi \lambda ^2`$ (see, e.g.<sup>7,8</sup>), and the field-induced dielastic pinning by dislocations, $`J_{cd}(\stackrel{}{E})=_p(\stackrel{}{E})/\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$ where the pinning force density $`_p(\stackrel{}{E})`$ is governed by the Eq.(6). Finally, for the total critical current density in dislocated thin films we get

$$J_c(\stackrel{}{E})=J_c(0)+J_{cd}(0)\frac{\stackrel{}{E}}{E_0}\mathrm{cos}\theta ,$$
(9)   
where

$$J_c(0)=J_{cm}J_{cd}(0).$$
(10)   
According to the well-known<sup>7,8</sup> estimates of $`J_{cm}`$ and $`J_{cd}(0)`$ for thin YBCO films, we can put $`J_{cm}J_{cd}(0)J_{cd}(0)`$, that is $`J_c(0)J_{cd}(0)`$. Using the experimental values for the field-free (at zero gate voltage $`V_G`$) and field-induced (at gate voltages $`V_G=\pm 10V`$ corresponding to the applied electric field of $`\pm 2.5\times 10^5V/cm`$) critical current densities obtained in SuFET-type measurements with YBCO thin films<sup>1</sup>, namely $`J_c(0)=10^8A/m^2,J_c(+10V)=6\times 10^7A/m^2`$, and $`J_c(10V)=1.2\times 10^8A/m^2`$, for an estimate of the threshold field $`E_0`$ the above Eq.(9) predicts the value of $`6\times 10^5V/cm`$ which corresponds to the breakdown voltage $`V_0=25V`$. Furthermore, using the fact that the thickness $`L`$ of YBCO thin films in the experiments carried out by Mannhart et al.<sup>1</sup> was ca. $`70\dot{A}`$, for the linear charge per length of dislocation we get the value $`q=e^{}/L=2\times 10^{11}C/m`$, that is $`qb0.3e^{}`$. This is quite comparable with the typical values known for the usual ionic dislocated crystals<sup>9,10</sup>. Moreover, in view of Eqs.(7) and (8), we can estimate the value of the static permittivity, $`ϵ_r`$, in screw dislocated YBCO thin films. Taking $`\rho 10^{10}cm^2`$ for the maximum dislocation density observed in these films<sup>1-3</sup>, we find $`ϵ_r0.01`$, which reasonably agrees with the typical permittivities in ionic dislocated crystals<sup>9,10</sup>. Remarkably, as the threshold field $`E_0`$ (see Eq.(7)) contains no specifically superconducting parameters, we can expect that this mechanism will persist above $`T_c`$, and will be practically insensitive to applied magnetic fields, in agreement with the observations<sup>1-3</sup>.

In summary, a possible scenario for electric-field induced critical current enhancement recently observed in screw dislocated YBCO thin films<sup>1</sup> has been proposed based on the converse piezoelectric effect originated from a heavily defected medium of the superconducting films in an applied electric field. The magnitude of the effect was found to depend concurrently on the film thickness and the number of dislocations inside a superconductor.