Manipulation of magnetic-flux landscapes in superconducting crystals

¹ Department of Physics, University of Bath - Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
² Frontier Research System, The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) Wako-shi, Saitama, 351-0198, Japan
³ Department of Physics, Loughborough University - Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
⁴ Department of Applied Physics, The University of Tokyo - 7-3-1 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo - 113-8656, Japan
⁵ Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1040, USA

Received: 26 June 2006
Accepted: 31 October 2006

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally that the micromagnetic profile of the out-of-plane component of magnetic induction of layered superconductors, B_z, can be manipulated by varying the in-plane magnetic field, . Moving Josephson vortices, confined between layers, drag pancake vortex stacks carrying out-of-plane flux, and the magnetic profile, , can be controllably shaped across the entire sample. Depending on the magnetic history and temperature we can increase or decrease the out-of-plane flux density at the center and near the edges of the crystal by as much as ~ 40%, realising both “convex and concave magnetic flux lenses”. Our experimental results are well described by molecular dynamics simulations.