Physics and Materials Science of Vortex States, Flux Pinning and Dynamics

This book contains most, but regrettably not all, the papers that were presented at the Advanced Research Study Institute, ASI, held at the Fantasia Hotel, Kusadasi, Turkey, July 26 - August 8, 1998. A powerful incentive to the development of vortex physics in superconductors, that has began with Abrikosov Vortices in Shubnikov's Mixed State, was realized after the discovery of the high-Tc superconductivity. Indeed, a number of the most intriguing phenomena and states of the flux line lattice are observed in high-Tc superconducting materials due to their high anisotropy, intrinsically layered crys­ tal structure, extremely small coherence length and the possibility of coexistence of superconducting vortex states with high-energy thermal fluctuation. These pe­ culiarities are demonstrated as the 2D flux line lattice of point-vortices (pan­ cakes), Josephson vortices or strings in parallel and/or tilted magnetic fields, flux line lattice melting into vortex liquid and its freezing into vortex "solid" (e. g. , crystal-or glass-like) state. It is well known, that the main reason for conditioning of the vortex ensemble state and behavior (except the extrinsic factors, such as applied magnetic field or temperature) is a set of intrinsic/extrinsic superconduct­ ing material properties caused by the crystal nature and symmetry, atoms ar­ rangement, anisotropy, as well as by the spectrum of crystal defects, their dimen­ sions, arrangement and density.