Emergent vortex behavior in superconductors and superfluids with single and multicomponent quantum condensates

Abstract

Using a self-devised numerical approach, we developed a powerful tool to investigate vortex properties and interactions in mean-field theories for superconductors and superfluids, based on fixing the vortex phase distribution in the energy minimization process. The method was applied to (i) multi-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and (ii) superconductors with single- or multi-component superconducting condensates. In these systems, vortex-vortex interaction and other key vortex features are analytically described only in specific regimes, that do not account for a large part of vortex behavior observed experimentally. In multi-component BECs, for example, the vortex-vortex interaction is only known for inter-vortex distances much greater than the healing length, i.e. far from the vortex core. Under our approach, by assuming multi-vortex structures, within Gross-Pitaevskii theory, we report the vortex-vortex interaction in the full range of distances, capturing the mechanism behind unusual vortex conformations previously reported in literature, such as bound clusters with two or three vortices. Usually, these clusters emerge from a competition between intra- and inter-component vortex interaction, but we demonstrate they can also emerge from the phase-frustration between the components. In superconductors, the description of vortex-vortex interaction is usually restricted to bulk or very thin films, and most of the key vortex features, such as the spatial magnetic field and current density profiles, are known only in the limit of London theory, i.e. for coherence length negligible as compared to magnetic field penetration depth and other system dimensions. The parametric range outside this limit is actually relevant to many materials. We fill that gap by applying our method to Ginzburg-Landau theory. The vortex structure is investigated for single- and two-gap bulk superconductors, outside the London regime. This enables us to extend analytical expressions describing the condensate and magnetic profiles around the vortex available in literature by numerical calculations and suitable fitting functions. We expand our approach to account for films with finite thickness, to connect our findings to both bulk and Pearl’s description by adjusting the sample thickness. This also allowed us to describe how vortex configurations change for samples with intermediate thickness, where we observe the effective magnetic response of the superconductor changing between the textbook type-1 and type-2 behaviors, in a nontrivial manner, governed by the non-monotonic vortex interaction. As a result of a detailed analysis, we propose new critical parameters to define the crossover between different regimes and establish their relation with the superconducting critical fields.