Can Topological Transitions be Exploited to Engineer Intrinsically Quench-resistant Wires?

Philip Whittlesea, Jorge Quintanilla, James F. Annett, Adrian D. Hillier, Chris Hooley

(Submitted on 7 Dec 2017 (v1), last revised 5 Jan 2018 (this version, v2))

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.

Comments: Accepted version for IEEE-TAS (Proceedings of EUCAS 2017)
Subjects: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
Journal reference: IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, 2018, 28(4):1-5
DOI: 10.1109/TASC.2018.2791515
Cite as: arXiv:1712.02771 [cond-mat.supr-con] (or arXiv:1712.02771v2 [cond-mat.supr-con] for this version)

Change log:

Added publication information on 10 Jan 2018 and 21 Feb 2018.

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