Mesoscopic p-wave superconductor near the phase transition temperature

We study the finite-size and boundary effects on a p-wave superconductor in a mesoscopic rectangular sample using Ginzburg-Landau and quasiclassical Green's function theory. Apart from a few very special cases, we find that the ground state near the critical temperature always prefers a time-reversal symmetric state, where the order parameter can be represented by a real vector. For large aspect ratio, this vector is parallel to the long side of the rectangle. Within a critical aspect ratio, it has instead a vortexlike structure, vanishing at the sample center. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.87.064507