Search

The orbital effect on the Fulde-Ferrell (FF) phase is investigated in superconducting core/shell nanowires subjected to the axial magnetic field. The confinement in the radial direction results in the quantization of the electron motion with energies determined by the radial $j$ and orbital $m$ quantum numbers. In the external magnetic field the twofold degeneracy with respect to the orbital magnetic quantum number $m$ is lifted which leads to the Fermi wave vector mismatch between the paired electrons $(k, j,m,\uparrow) \leftrightarrow (-k, j,-m,\downarrow)$. This mismatch is transfered to the nonzero total momentum of the Cooper pairs which results in the formation of FF phase occurring sequentially with increasing magnetic field. By changing the nanowire radius $R$ and the superconducting shell thickness $d$, we discuss the role of the orbital effect in the FF phase formation in both the nanowire-like ($R/d \ll 1$) and nanofilm-like ($R/d \gg 1$) regime. We have found that the irregular pattern of the FF phase, which appears for the case of the nanowire-like regime, evolves towards the regular distribution, in which the FF phase stability regions appear periodically between the BCS state, for the nanofilm-like geometry. The crossover between these two different phase diagrams is explained as resulting from the orbital effect and the multigap character of superconductivity in core/shell nanowires., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

We observed the appearance of capillary bridges in a granular medium consisting of glass beads after adding small amounts of liquid. We found the initial bridge formation depending on the bead roughness. Furthermore we obtained a statistics for the average number of bridges for randomly packed beads in dependence of the liquid content and were able to find an explanation therefore based on recent models and former experimental data.

We have studied the effect of small amounts of added liquid on the dynamic behavior of a granular system consisting of a mixture of glass beads of two different sizes. Segregation of the large beads to the top of the sample is found to depend in a nontrivial way on the liquid content. A transition to viscoplastic behavior occurs at a critical liquid content, which depends upon the bead size. We show that this transition can be interpreted as a condensation due to the hysteretic liquid bridge forces connecting the beads, and provide the corresponding phase diagram., Comment: submitted to PRL