A 2 CHANNEL MODEL AS A POSSIBLE MICROSCOPIC CONFIGURATION OF THE BARRIER IN HIGH-T(C) GRAIN-BOUNDARY JUNCTIONS

High-T(c) superconductors are intensively studied for applications such as biomagnetism, but the great difficulties in making integrated dc SQUIDs have slowed down applications in the biomedical field. Moreover, magnetic noise and energy resolution are not always low enough to permit measurements of human body magnetic signals. Noise in bicrystal and biepitaxial grain boundary junctions has been extensively analyzed, and both structures showed similar 1/f noise behaviors. In order to account for the experimental results, different models describing grain boundary junctions have been made, each able to explain some aspects of the phenomenology. In this work we suggest that the ''barrier'' is constituted by a large number of microscopic weak links in parallel, and we analyze the effects of such a model on noise properties and the temperature dependences of the critical current, finding a good agreement with most experiments carried out on grain boundary junctions.