Emergence of superconducting textures in two dimensions

Abstract

Self-organized regular patterns are ubiquitous in nature, and one of their most celebrated manifestations is the Abrikosov vortex lattice: under an applied magnetic field, the homogeneous superconductivity becomes unstable and cast itself into a regular texture of the "normal" filaments, called Abrikosov vortices, immersed into a superconducting matrix. Its prediction and the experimental discovery became a breakthrough in our understanding of superconductivity and founded a new direction in physics. Here we show that the interplay between the superconducting order parameter and elastic fields, which are intimately connected to the very existence of the superconductivity itself, can result in a novel superconducting state dual to the Abrikosov state: a regular texture of superconducting islands. The fact that both patterns emerge within the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau description of superconductivity indicates that the formation of regular structures may be a generic feature of any phase transition. Emergence of superconducting island arrays is not specific to the effect of the elastic forces, but can be caused by any inherent mechanism generating long-range non-local interactions in the Ginzburg-Landau functional, for example, by the Coulomb forces. In particular, our findings suggest the formation of a superconducting island textures as a scenario for a superconductor-to-insulator transition in thin films.