# CHIRAL GLASS PHASE IN CERAMIC SUPERCONDUCTORS

## I Introduction

Since the discovery ceramic high-$`T_c`$ superconductors it has been known that they may exhibit a glassy behavior reminiscent of the spin glass . Recently, by the noise and ac susceptibility measurements Leylekian et. al. demonstrated that LSCO ceramics show the glassy behavior even in zero external field . They also observed an intergranular cooperative phenomenon indicative of a glassy phase transition. This collective phenomenon may be interpreted in terms of the chiral glass (CG) picture  using a three-dimensional lattice model of the Josephson junctions with a finite self-conductance. The order parameter of the CG phase is a ”chirality” which represents the direction of the local loo-supercurrent over grains . The frustration essential to realize the CG phase arises due to random distribution of 0- and $`\pi `$-junctions with positive and negative Josephson couplings, respectively . In this paper we review our recent results obtained by Monte Carlo simulations on the nature of ordering of the CG. One of the most important conclusions is that the screening effect does not destroy this phase in three dimensions (the vortex glass phase which may exist only in the non-zero external field  is, in contrast, unstable under influence of the screening ). It should be noted that more direct support of the CG has been reported by the ac susceptibility  and resistivity  measurements on YBCO ceramic samples and by the aging effect in Bi<sub>2</sub>Sr<sub>2</sub>CaCu<sub>2</sub>O<sub>8</sub> .

Another issue of the present paper is to explain the so called compensation effect (CE) observed in some ceramic superconductors . Overall, this effect may be detected in the following way. The sample is cooled in the external dc field down to a low temperature and then the field is switched off. At the fixed low $`T`$ the second harmonics are monitored by applying the dc and ac fields to the sample. Due to the presence of non-zero spontaneous orbital moments the remanent magnetization or, equivalently, the internal field appears in the cooling process. If the direction of the external dc field is identical to that during the field cooled (FC) procedure, the induced shielding currents will reduce the remanence. Consequently, the absolute value of the second harmonics $`|\chi _2|`$ decreases until the signal of the second harmonics is minimized at a field $`H_{dc}=H_{com}`$. Thus the CE is a phenomenon in which the external and internal fields are compensated and the second harmonics become zero.

The key observation of Heinzel et al. is that the CE appears only in the samples which show the paramagnetic Meissner effect (PME)  but not in those which do not. It should be noted that the intrinsic mechanism leading to the PME is still under debate. Sigrist and Rice argued that the PME in the high-$`T_c`$ superconductors is consistent with the $`d`$-wave superconductivity. On the other hand, the paramagnetic response has been seen even in the conventional Nb  and Al  superconductors. In order to explain the PME in terms of conventional superconductivity one can employ the idea of the flux compression inside of a sample. Such phenomenon becomes possible in the presence of the inhomogeneities or of the sample boundary.

In this paper we explain the CE theoretically by Monte Carlo simulations. Our starting point is based on the possible existence of the CG phase in which the remanence necessary for observing the CE should occur in the cooling procedure. Such remanence phenomenon is similar to what happens in spin glass. In fact, in the CG phase the frustration due to existence of 0- and $`\pi `$-junctions leads to non-zero supercurrents. The internal field (or the remanent magnetization) induced by the supercurrents in the cooling process from high temperatures to the CG phase may compensate the external dc field.

Using the three-dimensional XY model of the Josephson network with finite self-inductance We show that in the FC regime the CE appears in the samples which show the PME. This finding agrees with the experimental data of Heinzel et al.

## II Model

We neglect the charging effects of the grain and consider the following Hamiltonian

$`={\displaystyle \underset{<ij>}{}}J_{ij}\mathrm{cos}(\theta _i\theta _jA_{ij})+`$ (1)   
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}{\displaystyle \underset{p}{}}(\mathrm{\Phi }_p\mathrm{\Phi }_p^{ext})^2,`$ (2)   
$`\mathrm{\Phi }_p={\displaystyle \frac{\varphi _0}{2\pi }}{\displaystyle \underset{<ij>}{\overset{p}{}}}A_{ij},A_{ij}={\displaystyle \frac{2\pi }{\varphi _0}}{\displaystyle _i^j}\stackrel{}{A}(\stackrel{}{r})𝑑\stackrel{}{r},`$ (3)   
where $`\theta _i`$ is the phase of the condensate of the grain at the $`i`$-th site of a simple cubic lattice, $`\stackrel{}{A}`$ is the fluctuating gauge potential at each link of the lattice, $`\varphi _0`$ denotes the flux quantum, $`J_{ij}`$ denotes the Josephson coupling between the $`i`$-th and $`j`$-th grains, $``$ is the self-inductance of a loop (an elementary plaquette), while the mutual inductance between different loops is neglected. The first sum is taken over all nearest-neighbor pairs and the second sum is taken over all elementary plaquettes on the lattice. Fluctuating variables to be summed over are the phase variables, $`\theta _i`$, at each site and the gauge variables, $`A_{ij}`$, at each link. $`\mathrm{\Phi }_p`$ is the total magnetic flux threading through the $`p`$-th plaquette, whereas $`\mathrm{\Phi }_p^{ext}`$ is the flux due to an external magnetic field applied along the $`z`$-direction,

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_p^{ext}=\{\begin{array}{cc}HS\hfill & \text{if }p\text{ is on the }<xy>\text{ plane}\hfill \\ 0\hfill & \text{otherwise},\hfill \end{array}$$
(4)   
where $`S`$ denotes the area of an elementary plaquette. In what follows we assume $`J_{ij}`$ to be an independent random variable taking the values $`J`$ or $`J`$ with equal probability ($`\pm J`$ or bimodal distribution), each representing 0 and $`\pi `$ junctions.

## III Existence of CG phase

In this section we employ the finite size scaling technique to study the nature of ordering of the CG phase in three dimension. The external field is set to be equal to zero ($`\mathrm{\Phi }_p^{ext}`$=0).

At each plaquette the local chirality is defined by the gauge-invariant quality,

$$\kappa =\mathrm{\hspace{0.33em}2}^{3/2}\underset{<ij>}{\overset{p}{}}\stackrel{~}{J}_{ij}\mathrm{sin}(\theta _i\theta _jA_{ij}),$$
(5)   
where $`\stackrel{~}{J}_{ij}=J_{ij}/J`$ and the sum runs over a directed contour along the sides of the plaquette $`p`$. The overlap between two replicas of the chirality is

$$q_\kappa =\frac{1}{N_p}\underset{p}{}\kappa _p^{(1)}\kappa _p^{(2)},$$
(6)   
where $`N_p`$ is the total number of plaquettes. In term of this chiral overlap, the Binder ratio of the chirality is defined as follows

$$g_{CG}=\frac{1}{2}(3[<q_\kappa ^4>]/[<q_\kappa ^2>]^2).$$
(7)   
Here $`<\mathrm{}>`$ and $`[\mathrm{}]`$ represent the thermal and the configuration average, respectively. $`g_{CG}`$ is normalized so that it tends to zero above the chiral-glass transition temperature, $`T_{CG}`$, and tends to unity below $`T_{CG}`$ provided the ground state is non-degenerate.

Monte Carlo simulation is performed according to the replica exchange method . Equilibration is checked by monitoring the stability of the results against at least three-times longer runs for a subset of samples. The free boundary conditions are employed. Fig. 1 shows the results for the system sizes $`L=3,4,6,8`$ and 10, and for the dimensionless inductance $`\stackrel{~}{}=1`$ ($`\stackrel{~}{}=(2\pi /\varphi _0)^2J`$). The number of samples we used is running from 1500 to 100 depending on the system size $`L`$. Obviously, all of the curves of $`g_{CG}`$ for $`L=3,4,6`$ and 8 cross at almost the same temperature, strongly suggesting the occurence of a finite-temperature CG transition at $`T_{CG}=0.286\pm 0.01`$. A more careful analysis  shows that the CG phase exists if $`\stackrel{~}{}`$ is smaller than a critical value $`\stackrel{~}{}_c`$, where $`5\stackrel{~}{}_c7`$. Thus, the CG phase is stable against the screening if the latter is not strong enough.

## IV Compensation effect

In order to study the CE one has to apply the external field $`H`$ which includes the dc and ac parts

$$H=H_{dc}+H_{ac}\mathrm{cos}(\omega t).$$
(8)   
It should be noted that the dc field is necessary to generate even harmonics. The ac linear susceptibilty of model (1) has been studied by Monte Carlo simulations. Here we go beyond our previous calculations of the linear ac susceptibility . We study the dependence of the second harmonics as a function of the dc field. In this way, we can make a direct comparison with the CE observed in the experiments .

The dimensionless magnetization along the $`z`$-axis mormalized per plaquette, $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$, is given by

$$\stackrel{~}{m}=\frac{1}{N_p\varphi _0}\underset{p<xy>}{}(\mathrm{\Phi }_p\mathrm{\Phi }_p^{ext}),$$
(9)   
where the sum is taken over all $`N_p`$ plaquettes on the $`<xy>`$ plane of the lattice. The real and imaginary parts of the ac second order susceptibility $`\chi _2^{}(\omega )`$ and $`\chi _2^{\prime \prime }(\omega )`$ are calculated as

$`\chi _2^{}(\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\pi h_{ac}}}{\displaystyle _\pi ^\pi }\stackrel{~}{m}(t)\mathrm{cos}(2\omega t)d(\omega t),`$ (10)   
$`\chi _2^{\prime \prime }(\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\pi h_{ac}}}{\displaystyle _\pi ^\pi }\stackrel{~}{m}(t)\mathrm{sin}(2\omega t)d(\omega t),`$ (11)   
where $`t`$ denotes the Monte Carlo time. The dimensionless ac field $`h_{ac}`$, dc field $`h_{dc}`$ are defined as follows

$`h_{ac}={\displaystyle \frac{2\pi H_{ac}S}{\varphi _0}},h_{dc}={\displaystyle \frac{2\pi H_{dc}S}{\varphi _0}},`$ (12)   
For model (1) the PME appears clearly for $`h_{dc}1`$ . So the largest $`h_{dc}`$ we take is 1. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the CG phase is found to exist below a critical value of the inductance $`\stackrel{~}{}_c`$ where $`5\stackrel{~}{}_c7`$. One has to choose, therefore, an $`\stackrel{~}{}`$ which is smaller than its critical value. To be sure that we are in the CG phase we choose $`\stackrel{~}{}=4`$ and $`T=0.1`$.

The second harmonics have been obtained by employing Monte Carlo simulations based on the standard Metropolis updating technique. While Monte Carlo simulations involve no real dynamics, one can still expect that they give useful information on the long-time behavior of the system. We take $`L=8`$ and $`\omega =0.001`$. The sample average is taken over 20-40 independent bond realizations. We set $`h_{ac}=0.1`$, corresponding to $`0.016`$ flux quantum per plaquette. Smaller value of $`h_{ac}`$ turned out to leave the results almost unchanged.

Fig. 2 shows the dependence of second harmonics $`|\chi _2|`$, $`|\chi _2|=\sqrt{(\chi _2^{})^2+(\chi _2^{\prime \prime })^2}`$, on $`h_{dc}`$ in the FC regime. Our calculations follow exactly the experimental procedure of Heinzel et al. First the system is cooled in the dc field $`h_{dc}=1`$ from $`T=0.7`$ down to $`T=0.1`$ which is below the paramagnet-chiral glass transition temperature $`T_{CG}0.17`$ . The temperature step is chosen to be equal to 0.05. At each temperature, the system is evolved through 2$`\times 10^4`$ Monte Carlo steps. When the lowest temperature is reached the dc field used in cooling is switched off and we apply the combined field given by Eq. (6). Using Eq. (7) and (8) we monitor the second harmonics (the technique for obtaing the ac susceptibility may be found in Ref. ) reducing the dc field from $`h_{dc}=1`$ to zero stepwise by an amount of $`\mathrm{\Delta }h_{dc}=0.05`$. $`|\chi _2|`$ reaches minimum at the compensation field $`h_{com}=0.7\pm 0.05`$. At this point, similar to the experimental findings, the intersection of $`\chi _2^{}`$ and $`\chi _2^{\prime \prime }`$ is observed. This fact indicates that at $`H_{com}`$ the system is really in the compensated state. Furthermore, in accord with the experiments, at the compensation point the real and imaginary parts should change their sign. Our results show that $`\chi _2^{}`$ changes its sign roughly at $`h_{dc}=h_{com}`$. A similar behavior is also displayed by $`\chi _2^{\prime \prime }`$ but it is harder to observe due to a smaller amplitude of $`\chi _2^{\prime \prime }`$.

In conclusion we have shown that the finite-temperature CG phase is not spoiled by the screening. The CE may be explained, at least qualitatively, by using the CG picture of the ceramic superconductors. The CE is shown to appear in the CG phase in which the PME is present but not in the samples without the PME .

Financial support from the Polish agency KBN (Grant number 2P03B-025-13) is acknowledged.