Topological defects in mixtures of superconducting condensates with different charges

Julien Garaud; Egor Babaev

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.89.214507

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Topological defects in mixtures of superconducting condensates with different charges

Julien Garaud, Egor Babaev

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.89.214507 · Physical Review B

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Abstract

We investigate the topological defects in phenomenological models describing mixtures of charged condensates with commensurate electric charges. Such situations are expected to appear for example in liquid metallic deuterium. This is modeled by a multicomponent Ginzburg-Landau theory where the condensates are coupled to the same gauge field by different coupling constants whose ratio is a rational number. We also briefly discuss the case where electric charges are incommensurate. Flux quantization and finiteness of the energy per unit length dictate that the different condensates have different winding and thus different number of (fractional) vortices. Competing attractive and repulsive interactions lead to molecule-like bound states between fractional vortices. Such bound states have finite energy and carry integer flux quanta. These can be characterized by the CP1 topological invariant that motivates their denomination as skyrmions.