Low-temperature nonreciprocal phase-slip barrier and kinetics

Derive the anomalous phase of thermally activated phase slips and the corresponding dissipative kinetics in noncentrosymmetric superconducting wires at temperatures beyond the time-dependent Ginzburg–Landau regime, using an Eilenberger-level treatment.

Background

The paper treats thermally activated phase slips near the superconducting transition using a generalized time-dependent Ginzburg–Landau theory for a disordered Rashba superconductor. In this framework, the thermodynamic Lifshitz invariants determine the activation barrier, while the kinetic Lifshitz invariant affects the fluctuation prefactor.

The authors note that experiments observe thermally activated behavior substantially below the Ginzburg–Landau window. Extending the calculation to all temperatures would require combining clean-wire saddle-point methods with quasiclassical Eilenberger theory for Rashba and exchange fields, as well as deriving dissipative dynamics beyond time-dependent Ginzburg–Landau theory.