Enhancing the critical current in quasiperiodic pinning arrays below and above the matching magnetic flux

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-Penrose quasiperiodic pinning arrays can significantly enhance the critical current in superconductors for magnetic fluxes both below and above the matching flux, expanding the operational range of superconducting devices.

Contribution

It introduces a new mechanism for flux pinning using non-Penrose quasiperiodic arrays, improving critical current performance beyond the matching flux.

Findings

Enhanced critical current for fluxes above the matching flux

Different flux pinning mechanism in non-Penrose quasiperiodic arrays

Potential applications in superconducting micro-electronics

Abstract

Quasiperiodic pinning arrays, as recently demonstrated theoretically and experimentally using a five-fold Penrose tiling, can lead to a significant enhancement of the critical current Ic as compared to "traditional" regular pinning arrays. However, while regular arrays showed only a sharp peak in Ic(Phi) at the matching flux Phi1 and quasiperiodic arrays provided a much broader maximum at Phi<Phi1, both types of pinning arrays turned out to be inefficient for fluxes larger than Phi1. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally the enhancement of Ic(Phi) for Phi>Phi1 by using non-Penrose quasiperiodic pinning arrays. This result is based on a qualitatively different mechanism of flux pinning by quasiperiodic pinning arrays and could be potentially useful for applications in superconducting micro-electronic devices operating in a broad range of magnetic fields.