Surface Superconductivity in a wedge

V. M. Fomin; J. T. Devreese; V. V. Moshchalkov

doi:doi:10.1209/epl/i1999-00569-0

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This article is an erratum for: [this article]

Issue		Europhys. Lett. Volume 46, Number 1, April 1999


Page(s)		118 - 119
Section		Geophysics, astronomy and astrophysics
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1209/epl/i1999-00569-0

DOI: 10.1209/epl/i1999-00569-0

Europhys. Lett, 46 (1), pp. 118-119 (1999)

Erratum
Europhys. Lett, 42 (5), pp. 553-558 (1998)

Surface superconductivity in a wedge

V. M. Fomin ¹, J. T. Devreese ¹ and V. V. Moshchalkov ²

¹ Theoretische Fysica van de Vaste Stof, Universiteit Antwerpen (UIA) Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Antwerpen, Belgium
² Laboratorium voor Vaste-Stoffysica en Magnetisme, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Celestijnenlaan 200 D, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium

PACS. 74.80-g - Spatially inhomogeneous structures.
PACS. 74.20De - Phenomenological theories (two-fluid, Ginzburg-Landau, etc.).
PACS. 74.25Dw - Superconductivity phase diagrams.

Two coefficients are wrong in eq. (16); the correct last term in the first square brackets and the last term in the curly brackets are, respectively,

$\begin{displaymath} -{2\alpha\over \pi n} \rho {\partial \psi_n(\rho, \varphi) \... ...lpha) {\partial \psi_n(\rho,\varphi) \over \partial \varphi}\,.\end{displaymath}$

The extrema shown in fig. 2 turn out to be spurious; the correct fig. 2 is as shown below.

$\begin{figure} \epsffile{F46120.1}\end{figure}$

With the variational approach, the optimal $1/\xi'^2$ is provided by the trial function (18) with n=0 for the smaller angles $0 < \alpha/\pi < 0.16$ and with n=1 for the larger angles $0.16 <\alpha/\pi \le 1$ .The "kink'' at $\alpha/\pi \approx 0.16$ results from the choice of our variational trial functions. At larger angles, there exists a surface-enhanced superconducting state with the current along the whole boundary, penetrating the nearest vicinity of the edge. At smaller angles, we find that a confined circulating superconducting current appears in the vicinity of the edge, sustaining higher magnetic fields than the nucleation field at the plane superconductor surface. For $\alpha \to 0$ , with our trial function with n=0, the nucleation field behaves asymptotically as $H_{\rm c3}/H_{\rm c2} = \sqrt{2/3}\,\alpha^{-1}$ .

***

We thank F. M. PEETERS and V. A. SCHWEIGERT for bringing to our attention, prior to publication, the fact that there is a discrepancy between some of their recent results and some of our variational results given in Europhys. Lett., 42 (5), pp. 553-558 (1998). We thank F. BROSENS for valuable discussions concerning the analytical structure of the theory.