Inertial mass of a superconducting vortex

Abstract

We show that a large contribution to the inertial mass of a moving superconducting vortex comes from transversal displacements of the crystal lattice. The corresponding part of the mass per unit length of the vortex line is $M_{l} = ({\rm m}_e^2c^{2}/64πα^{2}μλ_{L}^{4})\ln(λ_{L}/ξ)$ , where ${\rm m}_{e}$ is the the bare electron mass, $c$ is the speed of light, $α=e^{2}/{\hbar}c {\approx} 1/137$ is the fine structure constant, $μ$ is the shear modulus of the solid, $λ_{L}$ is the London penetration length and $ξ$ is the coherence length. In conventional superconductors, this mass can be comparable to or even greater than the vortex core mass computed by Suhl.