Critical vortex line length near a zigzag of pinning centers

A vortex line passes through as many pinning centers as possible on its way from one extremety of the superconductor to the other at the expense of increasing its self-energy. In the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau theory we study the relative growth in length, with respect to the straight line, of a vortex near a zigzag of defects. The defects are insulating pinning spheres that form a three-dimensional cubic array embedded in the superconductor. We determine the depinning transition beyond which the vortex line no longer follows the critical zigzag path of defects.Comment: 8 pages, 25 figures with low resolution option, 1 table. To be published in Eur. Phys. Jour.

Boundary Value Problems for the 2nd2^{nd}-order Seiberg-Witten Equations

It is shown that the non-homogeneous Dirichlet and Neuman problems for the $2^{nd}$-order Seiberg-Witten equation admit a regular solution once the $\mathcal{H}$-condition (described in the article) is satisfied. The approach consist in applying the elliptic techniques to the variational setting of the Seiberg-Witten equation.Comment: 19 page

Effects of boundaries in mesoscopic superconductors

A thin superconducting disk, with radius $R=4\xi$ and height $H=\xi$, is studied in the presence of an applied magnetic field parallel to its major axis. We study how the boundaries influence the decay of the order parameter near the edges for three-dimensional vortex states.Comment: To appear in Physica C as a special issue of M2S-HTS