Thermal Conductivity of Pure Type-II Superconductors in High Magnetic Fields

The electronic contribution to the thermal conductivity in a pure type-II superconductor in the gapless region (i.e., in a field close to the upper critical field Hc2) is obtained. Use is made of the fact that the order parameter is described by the Abrikosov solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equation and lξ₀1, where l is the electronic mean free path and ξ₀ is the coherence distance. It is shown that the thermal conductivity drops rapidly in the superconducting region like (Hc2-H)1/2, and is strongly anisotropic.