Giant flux creep and irreversibility in an Y-Ba-Cu-O crystal: An alternative to the superconducting-glass model

We report strong, anisotropic magnetic relaxation of the field-cooled and zero-field-cooled magnetization along the principal axes of an Y-Ba-Cu-O single crystal and interpret it with a thermally activated flux-creep model. A simple scaling argument shows that high thermal activation causes magnetic irreversibilities and critical currents to drop below the threshold of detectability at a reduced temperature difference 1-t proportional to H23, a power frequently observed in experiment and in particular in our crystal. © 1988 The American Physical Society.