1. Melting of vortex lattice in magnetic superconductor $\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4}$
- Author
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Koshelev, A. E., Willa, K., Willa, R., Smylie, M., Bao, J. -K., Chung, D. Y., Kanatzidis, M. G., Kwok, W. -K., and Welp, U.
- Subjects
Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con) ,Condensed Matter - Materials Science ,Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) ,Condensed Matter - Superconductivity ,Condensed Matter::Superconductivity ,Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Condensed Matter - 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 $\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4}$ 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 $\mathrm{Rb}\mathrm{Eu}\mathrm{Fe}_{4}\mathrm{As}_{4}$ 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., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B
- Published
- 2019
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