Strong Pinning and Plastic Deformations of the Vortex Lattice
A. Schönenberger, A. Larkin, E. Heeb, V. Geshkenbein, G. Blatter
Abstract
We investigate numerically the dynamically generated plastic deformations of a 3D vortex lattice (VL) driven through a disorder potential with isolated, strong pinning centers (point-like or extended along the field direction). We find that the VL exhibits a very peculiar dynamical behavior in the plastic flow regime, in particular, topological excitations consisting of three or four entangled vortices are formed. We determine the critical current density
j
c
and the activation energy for depinning
U
c
in the presence of a finite density of strong pinning centers.