Temperature and magnetic-field dependence of quantum creep in various high-Tcsuperconductors

1999

To investigate the quantum tunneling of almost macroscopic vortex segments we measured the normalized relaxation rate Q of superconducting currents for various high-T{sub c} superconductors (HTS's) down to 100 mK in magnetic fields up to 7 T. At fields below {approx_equal}0.5 T, Q is essentially independent of T in the temperature regime between thermally activated and quantum motion as theoretically expected. However, at higher fields, we find an unexpected linear T dependence of Q persisting down to the lowest temperatures in all investigated samples. Since these compounds were chosen to represent the distinct classes of dirty and clean HTS's, the extrapolated Q(T=0) values are used to di…