| Abstract: | I present work on superconducting vortices that are trapped along an isolated planar defect, a twin boundary. The behaviour of such vortices, which are much freer to move along this plane than across it, has bearing on diverse issues in statistical mechanics such as the kinetic roughening of driven interfaces. Moreover, freezing the motion across the plane implies that in the associated quantum system of interacting bosons motion is one-dimensional.
Vortices are widely regarded as prototype realizations of one of the simplest and most studied models in which disorder plays a non-trivial role. Trapped on a plane, they are especially interesting since at the reduced dimensionality makes the model describing this system exactly tractable with many universal and generic results. I will report results of drive-response experiments on individual superconducting vortices on a twin-boundary we conducted using a sharp magnetic MFM tip. While some of the results agree with the predictions of the underlying model, we find a major discrepancy with the model that may arise from non-equilibrium effects. |
