Experiments on Foucault Imaging of Superconducting Fluxons

Abstract

The out-of-focus method has been successfully employed in the dynamical observation of superconducting fluxons. However, owing to the large defocus distance needed to image fluxons with enough contrast it turns out that their correlation with structural defects, better imaged at focus, is troublesome. Among the standard methods of Lorentz microscopy the Foucault technique is a good candidate for removing this drawback, since it generates phase contrast in the focused image by masking part of the transmitted beam by means of an aperture.Therefore, simulations have been carried out both for one-dimensional fluxon models and more realistic two dimensional ones, with the result that enough contrast can be generated in the focused image in order to detect them. However, although these theoretical results suggest the feasibility of Foucault experiments, filling the gap between theory and practice is not an easy task, especially when considering the small angular deflections involved, of the order of 10−5 rad.