Physics and Materials Science of Vortex States, Flux Pinning and Dynamics (Nato Science Series E:)

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.