Physical Review Letters -- June 5, 2000 -- Volume 84, Issue 23, pp. 5395-5398
Disorder Induced Transitions in Layered Coulomb Gases and Superconductors
Baruch Horovitz(1) and Pierre Le Doussal(2)
(1) Department of Physics, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel
(2) CNRS-Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure,
24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Cedex 05
Paris, France
(Received 28 January 2000)
A 3D layered system of charges with logarithmic interaction parallel to the layers and random dipoles is studied via a novel variational method and an energy rationale which reproduces the known phase diagram for a single layer. Increasing interlayer coupling leads to successive transitions in which charge rods correlated in N>1 neighboring layers are nucleated by weaker disorder. For layered superconductors in the limit of only magnetic interlayer coupling, the method predicts and locates a disorder induced defect-unbinding transition in the flux lattice. While N = 1 charges dominate there, N>1 disorder induced defect rods are predicted for multilayer superconductors.
©2000 The American Physical Society
PACS: 74.60.Ge, 64.60.Cn, 74.80.Dm