Temperature and Purity Dependence of the Superconducting Critical Field,Hc2. III. Electron Spin and Spin-Orbit Effects

Abstract
A previously obtained solution of the linearized Gor'kov equations for the upper critical magnetic field Hc2 of a bulk type-II superconductor is extended to include the effects of Pauli spin paramagnetism and spin-orbit impurity scattering. To carry out the calculation, it is necessary to introduce an approximation which assumes that spin-orbit scattering is infrequent in comparison with spin-independent scattering. It is found that spin-orbit scattering counteracts the effects of the spin paramagnetism in limiting the critical field and improves agreement between theory and experiment.