English

Melting of vortex lattice in magnetic superconductor $\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4}$

Superconductivity 2019-09-18 v2 Materials Science Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

The iron-based superconductors are characterized by strong fluctuations due to high transition temperatures and small coherence lengths. We investigate fluctuation behavior in the magnetic iron-pnictide superconductor RbEuFe4As4\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4} by calorimetry and transport. We find that the broadening of the specific-heat transition in magnetic fields is very well described by the lowest-Landau-level scaling. We report calorimetric and transport observations for vortex-lattice melting, which is seen as a sharp drop of the resistivity and a step of the specific heat at the magnetic-field-dependent temperature. The melting line in the temperature/magnetic-field plane lies noticeably below the upper-critical-field line and its location is in quantitative agreement with theoretical predictions without fitting parameters. Finally, we compare the melting behavior of RbEuFe4As4\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4} with other superconducting materials showing that thermal fluctuations of vortices are not as prevalent as in the high-temperature superconducting cuprates, yet they still noticeably influence the properties of the vortex matter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.10236,
  title  = {Melting of vortex lattice in magnetic superconductor $\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4}$},
  author = {A. E. Koshelev and K. Willa and R. Willa and M. Smylie and J. -K. Bao and D. Y. Chung and M. G. Kanatzidis and W. -K. Kwok and U. Welp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.10236},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

9 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B