Y. Dewilde et al., SCANNING-TUNNELING-MICROSCOPY OBSERVATION OF A SQUARE ABRIKOSOV-LATTICE IN LUNI2B2, Physical review letters, 78(22), 1997, pp. 4273-4276
We present scanning tunneling microscopy measurements of the (001) sur
face of a LuNi(2)B2C borocarbide single crystal at 4.2 K. In zero fiel
d, the conductance versus voltage characteristics recorded at various
locations on the sample reproducibly provide a gap value of 2.2 meV. I
n a magnetic field of 1.5 and 0.375 T, the recordings of the conductan
ce as a function of position reveal a regular square vortex lattice ti
lted by 45 degrees with respect to the crystalline a axis. This unusua
l result is correlated with an in-plane anisotropy of the upper critic
al field H(c2)parallel to(45 degrees)/H(p)arallel to(c2)(0) = 0.92 at
4.2 K and is analyzed within the framework of Ginzburg-Landau theory.