Rayleigh instability of confined vortex droplets in critical superconductors.

Depending on the Ginzburg-Landau parameter κ, superconductors can either be fully diamagnetic if (type I superconductors) or allow magnetic flux to penetrate through Abrikosov vortices if (type II superconductors; refs , ). At the Bogomolny critical point, , a state that is infinitely degenerate with respect to vortex spatial configurations arises. Despite in-depth investigations of conventional type I and type II superconductors, a thorough understanding of the magnetic behaviour in the near-Bogomolny critical regime at κ  κ_c remains lacking. Here we report that in confined systems the critical regime expands over a finite interval of κ forming a critical superconducting state. We show that in this state, in a sample with dimensions comparable to the vortex core size, vortices merge into a multi-quanta droplet, which undergoes Rayleigh instability on increasing κ and decays by emitting single vortices. Superconducting vortices realize Nielsen-Olesen singular solutions of the Abelian Higgs model, which is pervasive in phenomena ranging from quantum electrodynamics to cosmology. Our study of the transient dynamics of Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen vortices in systems with boundaries promises access to non-trivial effects in quantum field theory by means of bench-top laboratory experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]