Energy of magnetic vortices in a rotating superconductor

Abstract

We carry out a systematic analytic investigation of stationary and cylindrically symmetric vortex configurations for simple models representing an incompressible nonrelativistic superconductor in a background, which is rigidly rotating with the angular velocity Ω. It is shown that although the magnetic and kinetic contributions to the energy per unit length of such a vortex are separately modified by the background angular velocity, its effect on the total energy per unit length cancels out. For a type II superconductor threaded by a parallel array of such vortices, this result implies that the conventionally defined local magnetic field strength H will not be equal to the local space average 〈B〉 of the magnetic induction B (as has previously been suggested), but instead that H will simply be equal to the London field BL=−(2m/q)Ω (where m and q are the mass and charge of the condensate particles).

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