We have developed a masked ion irradiation technique to engineer the energy landscape for vortices in oxide superconductors. This approach associates the possibility to design the landscape geometry at the nanoscale with the unique capability to adju
st depth of the energy wells for vortices. This enabled us to unveil the key role of vortex channeling in modulating the amplitude of the field matching effects with the artificial energy landscape, and to make the latter govern flux dynamics over an usually wide range of temperatures and applied fields.
We used oxygen ion irradiation to transfer the nanoscale pattern of a porous alumina mask into high- superconducting thin films. This causes a nanoscale spatial modulation of superconductivity and strongly affects the magneto-transport below, which s
hows a series of periodic oscillations reminiscent of the Little-Parks effect in superconducting wire networks. This irradiation technique could be extended to other oxide materials in order to induce ordered nanoscale phase segregation.
