Spontaneous fluxon production in annular Josephson tunnel junctions in the presence of a magnetic field

We report on the spontaneous production of fluxons in annular Josephson tunnel junctions during a thermal quench in the presence of a symmetry-breaking magnetic field. The dependence on field intensity B of the probability (f) over bar (1) to trap a single defect during the N-S phase transition depends drastically on the sample circumferences. We show that this can be understood in the framework of the same picture of spontaneous defect formation that leads to the experimentally well attested scaling behavior of (f) over bar (1) with quench rate in the absence of an external field.