No Arabic abstract
The distribution of the transport current in a superconducting filament aligned parallel to the flat surface of a semi-infinite bulk magnet is studied theoretically. An integral equation governing the current distribution in the Meissner state of the filament is derived and solved numerically for various filament-magnet distances and different relative permeabilities. This reveals that the current is depressed on the side of the filament adjacent to the surface of the magnet and enhanced on the averted side. Substantial current redistributions in the filament can already occur for low values of the relative permeability of the magnet, when the distance between the filament and the magnet is short, with evidence of saturation at moderately high values of this quantity, similar to the findings for magnetically shielded strips.
We study the magnetization of a cylindrical type-II superconductor filament covered by a coaxial soft-magnet sheath and exposed to an applied transverse magnetic field. Examining penetration of magnetic flux into the superconductor core of the filament on the basis of the Bean model of the critical state, we find that the presence of a non-hysteretic magnetic sheath can strongly enhance the field of full penetration of magnetic flux. The average magnetization of the superconductor/magnet heterostructure under consideration and hysteresis AC losses in the core of the filament are calculated as well.
Pancake vortices in stacks of thin superconducting films or layers are considered. It is stressed that in the absence of Josephson coupling topological restrictions upon possible configurations of vortices are removed and various examples of structures forbidden in bulk superconductors are given. In particular, it is shown that vortices may skip surface layers in samples of less than a certain size R_c which might be macroscopic. The Josephson coupling suppresses R_c estimates.
On the basis of exact solutions to the London equation the magnetic moment of a type II superconductor filament surrounded by a soft-magnet environment is calculated and the procedure of extracting the superconductor contribution from magnetic measurements is suggested. Comparison of theoretical results with experiments on MgB_2/Fe wires allows estimation of the value of critical current for the first magnetic flux penetration.
Our experiments show that for two or more pieces of a wire, of different lengths in general, combined in parallel and connected to a dc source, the current ratio evolves towards unity as the combination is cooled to the superconducting transition temperature Tc, and remains pinned at that value below it. This re-distribution of the total current towards equipartition without external fine tuning is a surprise. It can be physically understood in terms of a mechanism that involves the flux-flow resistance associated with the transport current in a wire of type-II superconducting material. It is the fact that the flux-flow resistance increases with current that drives the current division towards equipartition.
A relatively high critical temperature, Tc, approaching 40 K, places the recently-discovered superconductor magnesium diboride (MgB2) intermediate between the families of low- and copper-oxide-based high-temperature superconductors (HTS). Supercurrent flow in MgB2 is unhindered by grain boundaries, unlike the HTS materials. Thus, long polycrystalline MgB2 conductors may be easier to fabricate, and so could fill a potentially important niche of applications in the 20 to 30 K temperature range. However, one disadvantage of MgB2 is that in bulk material the critical current density, Jc, appears to drop more rapidly with increasing magnetic field than it does in the HTS phases. The magnitude and field dependence of Jc are related to the presence of structural defects that can pin the quantised magnetic vortices that permeate the material, and prevent them from moving under the action of the Lorentz force. Vortex studies suggest that it is the paucity of suitable defects in MgB2 that causes the rapid decay of Jc with field. Here we show that modest levels of atomic disorder, induced by proton irradiation, enhance the pinning, and so increase Jc significantly at high fields. We anticipate that chemical doping or mechanical processing should be capable of generating similar levels of disorder, and so achieve technologically-attractive performance in MgB2 by economically-viable routes.