Field theoretical approach to magnetically coupled layered superconductors

In this paper, we propose a quantum field theoretical renormalization group approach to the vortex dynamics of magnetically coupled layered superconductors, to supplement our earlier investigations on the Josephson-coupled case. We construct a two-dimensional multi-layer sine-Gordon type model which we map onto a gas of topological excitations. With a special choice of the mass matrix for our field theoretical model, vortex dominated properties of magnetically coupled layered superconductors can be described. The well known interaction potentials of fractional flux vortices are consistently obtained from our field-theoretical analysis, and the physical parameters (vortex fugacity and temperature parameter) are also identified. We analyse the phase structure of the multi-layer sine--Gordon model by a differential renormalization group method for the magnetically coupled case from first principles. The dependence of the transition temperature on the number of layers is found to be in agreement with known results based on other methods.