Magnetic field tuned reentrant superconductivity in out-of-equilibrium aluminum nanowires

Perpendicular-to-the-plane magnetic field tuned reentrant superconductivity in out-of-equilibrium, quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) planar nanowires is a novel, counterintuitive phenomenon. It was not until recently that a microscopic mechanism explaining the phenomenon as arising from the coexistence of superconductivity with phase-slip driven dissipation was developed. Here we present results on reentrance phenomena in quasi-1D aluminum nanowires with in-plane magnetic fields, transverse and longitudinal to the nanowire axis. The response to in-plane transverse magnetic fields in this geometry is qualitatively different from that previously reported for perpendicular-to-the-plane field experiments and for in-plane longitudinal field studies. The different feature in the data is an abrupt return to the superconducting state with increasing field at values of field corresponding to a single flux quantum for a short wire and a fractional flux quantum for a long wire. Since these findings are dramatically different from those involving perpendicular-to-the-plane magnetic fields, a different mechanism, as yet unidentified, may be at work.