Can Topological Transitions be Exploited to Engineer Intrinsically Quench-resistant Wires?
Abstract
We investigate whether by synthesising superconductors that are tuned to a topological, node-reconstruction transition point we could create superconducting wires that are intrinsically resilient to quenches. Recent work shows that the exponent characterising the temperature dependence of the specific heat of a nodal superconductor is lowered over a region of the phase diagram near topological transitions where nodal lines form or reconnect. Our idea is that the resulting enhancement of the low-temperature specific heat could have potential application in the prevention of superconductor quenches. We perform numerical simulations of a simplified superconductor quench model. Results show that decreasing the specific heat exponent can prevent a quench from occurring and improve quench resilience, though in our simple model the effects are small. Further work will be necessary to establish the practical feasibility of this approach.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.02771,
title = {Can Topological Transitions be Exploited to Engineer Intrinsically Quench-resistant Wires?},
author = {Philip Whittlesea and Jorge Quintanilla and James F. Annett and Adrian D. Hillier and Chris Hooley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.02771},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
Accepted version for IEEE-TAS (Proceedings of EUCAS 2017)