5 research outputs found
Estimates for the thermodynamic signatures of vortex-lattice melting in conventional superconductors
The first-order nature of the vortex-lattice melting transition in
copper-based layered high-Tc superconductors is well established. The
associated discontinuities in magnetization have been extensively studied, for
example, in YBa2Cu3O7 and Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8, while the respective latent heats have
been systematically investigated only in YBa2Cu3O7 and related compounds. The
apparent absence of such signatures in conventional superconductors such as Nb
raises the question whether or not the concept of vortex-lattice melting is
applicable at all in such materials. Based on available literature to describe
the vortex-state and using the Lindemann criterion, we estimate quantitatively
the order of magnitude for the expected latent heats of melting and the
associated discontinuities in magnetization, respectively, as functions of a
few known material parameters. It turns out that both thermodynamic quantities
are not strictly vanishing even in isotropic materials as long as , but they are small and may often be beyond the available
experimental resolution.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figure