Numerical simulations of the quantized vortices on a thin superconducting hollow sphere (Q703705)

This paper is devoted to numerical simulation of the vortex patterns nucleated by an applied magnetic field on a thin spherical superconducting shell. Similar to the case of a thin film, the authors solve the simplified equation using the spherical centroidal Voronoi tessellations (SCVT) to being a particular spherical Voronoi tessellation for which the generators coincide with the constrained mass centroids of the corresponding Voronoi cells with respect to some pre-defined density function defined on sphere surface. First, it is considered the basic Ginzburg-Landau (G-L) model and its time dependent version. In a non-dimensionalized form, the primary variables used in the G-L model are the complex scalar-valued order parameter, the real vector-valued magnetic potential and the real scalar-valued effective potential. In the case of a thin spherical shell with constant thickness it is obtained the reduced G-L model equation for order parameter at a given constant applied magnetic field. Then, for the case of the zero applied current, the steady state equation is given. One of the paper objective is to compute the ground state of energy and calculate the various solution branches for this equation. Moreover, it is studied the nucleation process and the vortex motion due to an applied current by solving the time dependent equation with both zero and nonzero electric potentials. For the time dependent G-L equation it is taken the gauge invariant backward Euler scheme for its discretization since such a method has unconditional stability. Due to the gauge invariant approximations a variational principle can be established for the time dependent simulation even when there is an applied current, thus allowing an efficient and unified implementation of the time dependent marching algorithm and leading to an effective time step control strategy. The considered physical variables include the free energy, the density of the superconducting Cooper-pairs, the induced magnetic field and the super-current. To describe the equilibrium vortex state extensive numerical experiments are conducted to probe the landscape of the reduced free energy functional corresponding to various values of the applied magnetic field. In order to estimate the effect of the sphere shell thickness, the corrected magnetic field is computed. In order to see the effect of coherence length it is computed a couple of different solution branches. The time dependent equation with an initial superconducting state is solved to examine numerically the vortex nucleation process. Finally, the time dependent equation with the prescribed electric potential is solved to estimate the vortex motion due to the Lorenz force.