Electric-field-driven dissipative structures in superconductors

by Dr Shamashis Sengupta (CNRS and Université Paris-Saclay Orsay, France)

Thursday 12 Nov 2026, 11:30 → 13:30 Asia/Kolkata

AG 80 (TIFR,Mumbai)

In nonequilibrium thermodynamics, it is known that driving a system far from

equilibrium can lead to the emergence of structures with macroscopic spatial and temporal scales. Such dissipative structures [1,2] are found across a broad range of physical systems, from chemical reactions and fluid flows to biological processes. These observations raise an intriguing question: Can such nonequilibrium structures also emerge in superconductors, where the macroscopic state is described by a complex order parameter? How might we experimentally detect and characterize them?

The Josephson effect offers a starting point to address this topic. In superconducting weak links, temporal fluctuations of the phase of the order parameter are directly related to the voltage. This phenomenon has enabled a range of applications, including microwave sources and superconducting quantum devices. The conventional Josephson effect is typically studied in low-dimensional devices engineered to have weak links or junctions with at least one dimension comparable to the coherence length. Here, we explore whether analogous physics can arise in a fundamentally different setting - a homogeneous, unpatterned, three-dimensional superconductor driven far from equilibrium. We will present our experimental results [3] on electric-field-driven dissipative states in large superconducting films and discuss the properties of the nonequilibrium structures that emerge.

 

[1] I. Prigogine, “Time, structure, and fluctuations”, Nobel Lecture in Chemistry (1977)

[2] H. Mori and Y. Kuramoto, “Dissipative Structures and Chaos”, Berlin:Springer  (1998)

[3] I. Cojocari et al., “The electric-field-driven intermediate state of three- dimensional

superconductors”,  arXiv:2606.18931