Giant Flux Creep and Irreversibility in an Y-Ba-Cu-O Crystal: An Alternative to the Superconducting-Glass Model

Abstract

We report strong, anisotropic magnetic relaxation of the field-cooled and zero-field-cooled magnetization along the principal axes of an Y-Ba-Cu-O single crystal and interpret it with a thermally activated flux-creep model. A simple scaling argument shows that high thermal activation causes magnetic irreversibilities and critical currents to drop below the threshold of detectability at a reduced temperature difference $1-t$ proportional to $H^{\frac{2}{3}}$, a power frequently observed in experiment and in particular in our crystal.