Temperature dependence of the upper critical field of type-II superconductors from isothermal magnetization data. Application to high temperature superconductors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scaling method based on Ginzburg-Landau theory to determine the temperature dependence of the upper critical field and critical temperature in type-II superconductors from magnetization data, revealing universal behavior among high-temperature superconductors.

Contribution

It presents a simple, general scaling procedure to extract critical parameters from magnetization measurements, applicable across various high-temperature superconductor families.

Findings

Normalized upper critical field curves are nearly identical across different high-temperature superconductor families.

The method accurately determines the critical temperature Tc from magnetization data.

Universal behavior of the upper critical field dependence on temperature is observed.

Abstract

Using the Ginzburg-Landau theory in very general terms, we develop a simple scaling procedure which allows to establish the temperature dependence of the upper critical field and the value of the superconducting critical temperature Tc of type-II superconductors from measurements of the reversible isothermal magnetization. An analysis of existing experimental data shows that the normalized dependencies the upper critical field on T/Tc are practically identical for all families of high temperature superconductors at all temperatures for which the magnetization data are available.