Interlayer Phase Locking and Sliding Select Topological Melting Channels in Superconducting Bilayers
Abstract
Topological transitions in coupled superconducting layers are intertwined: an elementary vortex in one layer carries both common and relative phase winding. We study a Josephson-coupled bilayer in an in-plane magnetic field using renormalization-group analysis and Monte Carlo simulations of the compact layer phases. The field drives Pokrovsky--Talapov (PT) entry of interlayer solitons, and free-energy calculations in fixed soliton sectors show PT square-root scaling over the sampled densities at finite temperature. Interlayer phase locking and sliding then select distinct Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT)-like melting channels. The locked commensurate phase melts through same-vorticity layer pairs when the geometric-mean common helicity modulus Υ+,g reaches T/(2π), with layer correlation exponent ηl=1/4. A stable sliding incommensurate phase melts through elementary layer vortices on a line of BKT fixed points, where Υ+,g+Υ−,g=2T/π and ηl is set by the ratio of the relative and common moduli. When the relative helicity modulus is identified with the relative-phase stiffness, our simulations agree with this prediction, and the common superfluid stiffness at incommensurate melting is nearly twice its value at commensurate melting. Near soliton entry, however, the dilute sliding state is unstable to opposite-vorticity layer pairs. Our results connect PT soliton entry with field-tunable BKT-like melting and identify the pair-stability condition that links them.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhong2026interlayer,
title = {{Interlayer Phase Locking and Sliding Select Topological Melting Channels in Superconducting Bilayers}},
author = {Yicheng Zhong and Yi Zhou},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.12401},
eprint = {2607.12401},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12401},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Interlayer Phase Locking and Sliding Select Topological Melting Channels in Superconducting Bilayers
AU - Yicheng Zhong
AU - Yi Zhou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.12401
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12401
AB - Topological transitions in coupled superconducting layers are intertwined: an elementary vortex in one layer carries both common and relative phase winding. We study a Josephson-coupled bilayer in an in-plane magnetic field using renormalization-group analysis and Monte Carlo simulations of the compact layer phases. The field drives Pokrovsky--Talapov (PT) entry of interlayer solitons, and free-energy calculations in fixed soliton sectors show PT square-root scaling over the sampled densities at finite temperature. Interlayer phase locking and sliding then select distinct Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT)-like melting channels. The locked commensurate phase melts through same-vorticity layer pairs when the geometric-mean common helicity modulus Υ_+,g reaches T/(2π), with layer correlation exponent η_l=1/4. A stable sliding incommensurate phase melts through elementary layer vortices on a line of BKT fixed points, where Υ_+,g+Υ_−,g=2T/π and η_l is set by the ratio of the relative and common moduli. When the relative helicity modulus is identified with the relative-phase stiffness, our simulations agree with this prediction, and the common superfluid stiffness at incommensurate melting is nearly twice its value at commensurate melting. Near soliton entry, however, the dilute sliding state is unstable to opposite-vorticity layer pairs. Our results connect PT soliton entry with field-tunable BKT-like melting and identify the pair-stability condition that links them.
ER -