Influence of the interplay between de Gennes boundary conditions and cubicity of Ginzburg-Landau equation on the properties of superconducting films

Abstract

Exact solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equation for the straight film subjected at its edges to the Robin-type boundary conditions characterized by the extrapolation length $\Lambda$ are analyzed with the primary emphasis on the interaction between the coefficient $\beta$ of the cubic GL term and the de Gennes distance $\Lambda$ and its influence on the temperature $T$ of the strip. Very substantial role is played also by the carrier density $n_s$ that naturally emerges as an integration constant of the GL equation. Physical interpretation of the obtained results is based on the $n_s$-dependent effective potential $V_{eff}({\bf r})$ created by the nonlinear term and its influence on the lowest eigenvalue of the corresponding Schr\"{o}dinger equation. In particular, for the large cubicities, the temperature $T$ becomes $\Lambda$ independent linearly decreasing function of the growing $\beta$ since in this limit the boundary conditions can not alter very strong $V_{eff}$. It is shown that the temperature increase, which is produced in the linear GL regime by the negative de Gennes distance, is wiped out by the growing cubicity. In this case, the decreasing $T$ passes through its bulk value $T_c$ at the unique density $n_s^{(0)}$ only, and the corresponding extrapolation length $\Lambda_{T=T_c}$ is an analytical function of $\beta$ whose properties are discussed in detail. For the densities smaller than $n_s^{(0)}$, the temperature stays above $T_c$ saturating for the large cubicities to the value determined by $n_s$ and negative $\Lambda$ while for $n_s>n_s^{(0)}$ the superconductivity is destroyed by the growing GL nonlinearity at some temperature $T>T_c$, which depends on $\Lambda$, $n_s$ and $\beta$. It is proved that the concentration $n_s^{(0)}$ transforms for the large cubicities into the density of the bulk sample.