Periodic Oscillations of the Resistive Transition in Superconducting Wire Networks — Influence of Pinning and Fluctuations

Abstract

We investigated the resistive transition of 2D superconducting wire networks. Periodic oscillations of the critical temperature and critical current in a magnetic field have been studied for different network parameters. In weakly coupled wire arrays, the oscillations can be much larger than expected for the Ginzburg-Landau phase transition, but are observed in a limited temperature range below the transition. These results are understood in terms of a periodic pinning potential for vortices on the array, for which a simple estimate is possible in the limit of small ratios ξ/a of the coherence length to the array period.