Nb films containing extended arrays of holes with 45-nm diameter and 100-nm spacing have been fabricated using anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) as substrate. Pronounced matching effects in the magnetization and Little-Parks oscillations of the superconducting critical temperature have been observed in fields up to 9 kOe. Flux pinning in the patterned samples is enhanced by two orders of magnitude as compared to unpatterned reference samples in applied fields exceeding 5 kOe. Matching effects are a dominant contribution to vortex pinning at temperatures as low as 4.2 K due to the extremely small spacing of the holes.
We study experimentally the critical depinning current Ic versus applied magnetic field B in Nb thin films which contain 2D arrays of circular antidots placed on the nodes of quasiperiodic (QP) fivefold Penrose lattices. Close to the transition temperature Tc we observe matching of the vortex lattice with the QP pinning array, confirming essential features in the Ic(B) patterns as predicted by Misko et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett, vol.95, 177007 (2005)]. We find a significant enhancement in Ic(B) for QP pinning arrays in comparison to Ic in samples with randomly distributed antidots or no antidots.
In order to compare magnetic and non-magnetic pinning we have nanostructured two superconducting films with regular arrays of pinning centers: Cu (non-magnetic) dots in one case, and Py (magnetic) dots in the other. For low applied magnetic fields, when all the vortices are pinned in the artificial inclusions, magnetic dots prove to be better pinning centers, as has been generally accepted. Unexpectedly, when the magnetic field is increased and interstitial vortices appear, the results are very different: we show how the stray field generated by the magnetic dots can produce an effective reduction of the penetration length. This results in strong consequences in the transport properties, which, depending on the dot separation, can lead to an enhancement or worsening of the transport characteristics. Therefore, the election of the magnetic or non-magnetic character of the pinning sites for an effective reduction of dissipation will depend on the range of the applied magnetic field.
We experimentally investigate the vortex induced energy losses in niobium coplanar waveguide resonators with and without quasihexagonal arrays of nanoholes (antidots), where large-area antidot patterns have been fabricated using self-assembling microsphere lithography. We perform transmission spectroscopy experiments around 6.25 and 12.5 GHz in magnetic field cooling and zero field cooling procedures with perpendicular magnetic fields up to B=27 mT at a temperature T=4.2 K. We find that the introduction of antidot arrays into resonators reduces vortex induced losses by more than one order of magnitude.
We examine the current driven dynamics for vortices interacting with conformal crystal pinning arrays and compare to the dynamics of vortices driven over random pinning arrays. We find that the pinning is enhanced in the conformal arrays over a wide range of fields, consistent with previous results from flux gradient-driven simulations. At fields above this range, the effectiveness of the pinning in the moving vortex state can be enhanced in the random arrays compared to the conformal arrays, leading to crossing of the velocity-force curves.
We present transport measurement results on superconducting Nb films with diluted triangular arrays (honeycomb and kagom{e}) of holes. The patterned films have large disk-shaped interstitial regions even when the edge-to-edge separations between nearest neighboring holes are comparable to the coherence length. Changes in the field interval of two consecutive minima in the field dependent resistance $R(H)$ curves are observed. In the low field region, fine structures in the $R(H)$ and $T_c(H)$ curves are identified in both arrays. Comparison of experimental data with calculation results shows that these structures observed in honeycomb and kagom{e} hole arrays resemble those in wire networks with triangular and $T_3$ symmetries, respectively. Our findings suggest that even in these specified periodic hole arrays with very large interstitial regions, the low field fine structures are determined by the connectivity of the arrays