We show that the effect of a high-temperature environment in current transport through a normal metal-insulator-superconductor tunnel junction can be described by an effective density of states in the superconductor. In the limit of a resistive low-Ohmic environment, this density of states reduces into the well-known Dynes form. Our theoretical result is supported by experiments in engineered e...

We demonstrate a superconductor array of subwavelength holes with active thermal control over the resonant transmission induced by surface plasmon polaritons. The array was lithographically fabricated on a high-temperature yttrium barium copper oxide superconductor and characterized by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. We observe a clear transition from a virtual excitation of the surface pla...

A serious obstacle impeding the application of lowand hightemperature superconductor devices is the presence of trapped magnetic flux: flux lines or vortices can be induced by fields as small as the Earth’s magnetic field. Once present, vortices dissipate energy and generate internal noise, limiting the operation of numerous superconducting devices. Methods used to overcome this difficulty incl...

We describe the decomposition of Abrikosov vortices into decoupled pancake vortices in superconductors having both electron and hole charge carriers. We estimate the critical current of such a decomposition, at which a superconducting-normal state transition occurs, and find that it is very sensitive to the magnetic field and temperature. The effect can be observed in recently synthesized self-...

A modified close cycle helium gas cryogenic system was used to measure the flux drag torque acting on a free spinning disk magnet by a single grain YBCO superconductor. It was found that at low spinning speed ( less than 8 Hz ) and constant levitation height, the flux drag torque decreased with temperature which behavior is roughly similar to the temperature dependence of the reciprocal of crit...

We have performed low-temperature specific heat and thermal conductivity measurements of the Ni-based superconductor BaNi2As2 (T{c}=0.7 K) in a magnetic field. In a zero field, thermal conductivity shows T-linear behavior in the normal state and exhibits a BCS-like exponential decrease below T{c}. The field dependence of the residual thermal conductivity extrapolated to zero temperature is indi...