Temperature dependence of the upper critical field of type-II superconductors from isothermal magnetization data: Application to high-temperature superconductors

Using the Ginzburg-Landau theory in very general terms, we develop a simple scaling procedure which allows to establish the temperature dependence of the upper critical field H-c2 and the value of the superconducting critical temperature T-c of type-II superconductors from measurements of the reversible isothermal magnetization. An analysis of existing experimental data shows that the normalized dependencies of H-c2 on T/T-c are practically identical for all families of high-T-c superconductors at all temperatures for which the magnetization data are available.