EXTRAPOLATION PROCEDURES IN HIGH-T-C GAP-FUNCTION EXPERIMENTS

Recent experiments have employed the phase sensitive nature of the Jos ephson effect to determine the wave-vector dependent phase of the gap function in high-temperature superconductors. A parallel combination o f Josephson junctions, commonly referred to as a de SQUID configuratio n, has been used in many experiments to probe the gap function symmetr y via transport measurements. Asymmetries in the junction properties h ave required various extrapolation procedures to extract symmetry info rmation from measured field-dependent transport measurements. Here we analyze the finite-temperature properties of this system in the experi mentally relevant limit of large self-inductance, where the asymmetry is due to a difference in junction critical currents. We derive a scal ing relation between systems of different self-inductance, leading to a new extrapolation procedure to determine the gap function symmetry.