Figure 3.

Calculated vortex configurations plotted as the Cooper-pair density for the ground state of a SN of width $w=12\xi$ in a periodic cell of $L=64\xi$ at different applied $H/H_{c2}$ values: (a) 0.08; (b) 0.20; (c) 0.42; (d) 0.43; (e) 0.45; (f) 0.77; (g) 0.80; (h) 0.87 (cf. Figure 2). Panels (b,d,g) depict the vortex states at the nucleation of a second, third and fourth row, respectively. Panels (c,e,h) show the most lattice-like packing conditions for two, three and four vortex rows, respectively. The white lines connecting the cores of three neighbouring vortices illustrate the deformation of the Abrikosov lattice [47] in the SN. The colour bar denotes the values of the Cooper-pair density shown in the panels. Each depicted configuration is indicated in Figure 2 with an open dot and is labelled accordingly.