Exploring the Kibble-Zurek mechanism with superconducting rings

by David Weir (University of Helsinki)

Tuesday 26 Nov 2013, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Stockholm

Nordita West (122:026)

I will discuss the current status of defect formation experiments in superconducting rings carried out by my experimental collaborators at DTU, and my attempts to understand them with non-equilibrium field theory simulations. This work forms part of a broader effort to study the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in the laboratory, motivated by the behaviour of second order phase transitions in the early universe. However, much of the physics of defect formation in condensed matter systems depends on finite size effects and so direct comparisons with cosmology are difficult to make.