Sine-Gordon description of Beresinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless vortices in superconductors immersed in an external magnetic field

The Beresinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) physics of vortices in two-dimensional superconductors at finite magnetic field is investigated by means of a field-theoretical approach based on the sine-Gordon model. This description leads to a straightforward definition of the field-induced magnetization and shows that the persistence of nonlinear effects at low fields above the transition is a typical signature of the fast divergence of the correlation length within the BKT theory.