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Twin-Boundary Pinning Of Superconducting Vortex Arrays, M. Cristina Marchetti, Valerii M. Vinokur

Physics - All Scholarship

We discuss the low-temperature dynamics of magnetic flux lines in high-temperature superconductors in the presence of a family of parallel twin planes that contain the $c$ axis. A current applied along the twin planes drives flux motion in the direction transverse to the planes and acts like an electric field applied to {\it one-dimensional} carriers in disordered semiconductors. As in flux arrays with columnar pins, there is a regime where the dynamics is dominated by superkink excitations that correspond to Mott variable range hopping (VRH) of carriers. In one dimension, however, rare events, such as large regions void of twin …