Magnetic field-dependent inhomogeneities and their effect on the magnetoresponse of 2D superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates how magnetic fields influence inhomogeneities in 2D superconductors, affecting their magnetoresponse by analyzing orbital effects on superfluid stiffness and phase disorder near the superconductor-normal transition.

Contribution

It provides explicit expressions for the magnetic field dependence of magnetoresistance and superfluid stiffness, highlighting the role of orbital effects in different physical regimes.

Findings

Magnetic fields significantly affect inhomogeneities near the SNT.

Orbital effects alter superfluid stiffness and phase disorder.

Explicit field dependence expressions match some experimental results.

Abstract

We show that inhomogeneities in the spatial distribution of Cooper pairs and in the phase of the local superconducting order parameter in the vicinity of a superconductor-normal state transition (SNT) in two dimensions can be highly sensitive to a perpendicular magnetic field. We focus on the role of orbital effects in the field-dependence of local superfluid stiffness and superconducting phase disorder in homogeneously-disordered two-dimensional superconductor thin films. The relative importance of these orbital effects is analyzed in different physical regimes dominated by Coulomb blockade, thermal phase fluctuations and Aharanov-Bohm phase disorder respectively. Following this approach, we obtain explicit expressions for the field dependence of magnetoresistance and superfluid stiffness near the SNT, and attempt an understanding of some recent experimental findings.