We present a theoretical and experimental study of the peak effect in the surface pinning of vortices. It is associated with a sharp transition in the vortex slippage length which we relate to a crossover from a weakly disordered crystal to a surface glass state. Experiments are performed on ion-beam etched Nb crystals. The slippage length is deduced from 1kHz-1MHz linear AC penetration depth measurements.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0403616,
title = {Peak-effect and surface crystal-glass transition for surface-pinned vortex array},
author = {Bernard Placais and Norbert Lutke-Entrup and Joel Bellessa and Patrice Mathieu and Yvan Simon and Edouard Sonin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0403616},
year = {2019}
}