Objective
The possibilities of practical applications of superconducting materials are determined by their critical parameters. For bulk homogeneous superconductors these parameters depend only on the material itself. For mesoscopic and nanostructured superconductors, however, all the critical parameters (except the critical temperature) can be improved by enhancing the pinning force and reducing the effective area penetrated by the magnetic field.
The aim of this research project is to work out the optimization procedure of the control of the superconducting critical parameters by designing the necessary confinement geometry for the superconducting condensate and for the flux lines.
This objective will be fulfilled by elaborating the fundamentals of the confinement and quantization effects in the mesoscopic regime, when the confinement length is comparable or smaller than the superconducting coherence length. In this case the superconducting state is strongly influenced by the boundary conditions, which can be eventually designed and imposed in such a way that provides the controlled variation of the critical fields, surface barriers and the pinning force.
Different types of superconducting samples will be used: from micrometer and submicrometer low and high Tc mesoscopic samples of various topologies (loops, discs, bolas, microbridges etc.) to macroscopic samples with introduced well-defined defects (submicrometer holes, lattices of these holes, n. scale amorphous tracks) and interface areas with the proximity induced superconductivity.
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
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3001 Heverlee - Leuven
Belgium