The field of superconductivity has gained much attention in recent years due to the discovery of the high temperature cuprate superconductors. Besides their high transition temperature (T,s up to = 160 K), they show a variety of physical properties that are remarkably different from those of conventional superconductors. Two of these are persistent photoconductivity (PPC) and persistent photoin...

In this paper we report basic properties of iron-based superconductors and review the latest achievements in the fabrication of conductors based on these materials. We compare state-of-theart results with performances obtained with low-Tc and high-Tc technical superconductors, evidencing in particular the most significant differences with respect to high-Tc cuprate coated conductors. Although t...

Zn and Ni impurities in the hole-doped high-temperature superconductors are known to have strong effects on thermodynamic and transport properties. A recent scanning tunneling microscope study of Zn-doped Bi2212 (Pan et al., Nature 403, 746 (2000)) has provided high-resolution images of the local density of states around non-magnetic impurities in dx2−y2-wave superconductors. These pictures con...

We propose that a new state with a fully gapless Fermi surface appears in quasi-2D multiband superconductors in magnetic field applied parallel to the plane. It is characterized by a paramagnetic moment caused by a finite density of states on the open Fermi surface. We calculate thermodynamic and magnetic properties of the gapless state for both s-wave and d-wave cases, and discuss the details ...

We review some aspects of the isotope effect (IE) in superconductors. Our focus is on the influence of factors not related to the pairing mechanism. After summarizing the main results obtained for conventional superconductors, we review the effect of magnetic impurities, the proximity effect and non-adiabaticity on the value of the isotope coefficient (IC). We discuss the isotope effect of Tc a...

Relativistic effects in materials containing heavy atoms pervade many areas of condensed-matter physics [1-4]. The present chapter is devoted to the theory of relativistic effects in a particularly interesting class of materials, namely superconductors and other superfluids [5-9]. At its present stage that theory is limited to single-particle effects (on the level of the Dirac equation); a rela...

Recent experiments have demonstrated that the metamaterial approach is capable of drastic increase of the critical temperature T c of epsilon near zero (ENZ) metamaterial superconductors. For example, tripling of the critical temperature has been observed in Al-Al 2 O 3 ENZ core-shell metamaterials. Here, we perform theoretical modelling of T c increase in metamaterial superconductors based on ...

We calculate corrections to the BCS gap equation caused by the interaction of electrons with the collective phase and amplitude modes in the superconducting state. This feedback reduces the BCS gap parameter, ∆, and leaves the critical temperature, Tc, unchanged. The feedback effect is proportional to (∆/EF ), where EF is the Fermi energy. This is a negligible correction for type-I superconduct...

The problem of electrostatic potential distribution in superconductors is studied based on the microscopic theory of superconductors. Local chemical potential of the superconductor is introduced, and an approximation is made to BG theory, which is similar to the Thomas-Fermi (TF) method used in quantum mechanics. The electrostatic potential and charge distribution around an isolated vortex in t...