Evidence for nonlocal electrodynamics in planar Josephson junctions.

We study the temperature dependence of the critical current modulation I(c)(H) for two types of planar Josephson junctions: a low-Tc Nb/CuNi/Nb and a high-Tc YBa2Cu3O(7-δ) bicrystal grain-boundary junction. At low T both junctions exhibit a conventional behavior, described by the local sine-Gordon equation. However, at elevated T the behavior becomes qualitatively different: the I(c)(H) modulation field ΔH becomes almost T independent and neither ΔH nor the critical field for the penetration of Josephson vortices vanish at Tc. Such an unusual behavior is in good agreement with theoretical predictions for junctions with nonlocal electrodynamics. We extract absolute values of the London penetration depth λ from our data and show that a crossover from local to nonlocal electrodynamics occurs with increasing T when λ(T) becomes larger than the electrode thickness.