Flux pinning by a special grain boundary in a niobium bicrystal

Abstract
Flux pinning by a grain boundary has been studied in a special niobium bicrystal with the [111] direction in one grain and the [100] direction in other, both parallel to the grain-boundary plane. The results show that, in this special case, the flux-pinning force can be attributed primarily to the electron-scattering mechanism despite the fact that the contribution to the pinning force due to the anisotropy of the upper critical field H c2 is a maximum under the given conditions.