Spontaneous fluxon formation in annular josephson tunnel junctions

It has been argued by Zurek and Kibble that the likelihood of producing defects in a continuous phase transition depends in a characteristic way on the quench rate. In this paper we discuss our experiment for measuring the Zurek-Kibble (ZK) scaling exponent $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ for the production of fluxons in annular symmetric Josephson tunnel junctions. The predicted exponent is $\ensuremath{\sigma}=0.25,$ and we find $\ensuremath{\sigma}=0.27\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.05.$ Further, there is agreement with the ZK prediction for the overall normalization.

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