Disordered BKT transition and superinsulation

Abstract

Strongly disordered superconducting films have been observed to undergo finite temperature transitions to a superinsulating state, of apparently infinite resistance, mirroring superconductivity. Approaching the transition, some of the films reportedly exhibit Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) criticality implying that superinsulation is associated with an ordered charge BKT phase. An even more singular Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann (VFT) criticality has also been seen, positing the question of the existence of fundamentally different states of finite temperature insulators. Here we develop a theory of the criticality of a disordered lateral Josephson junction array with weak Josephson coupling. We show that it is equivalent to a two-dimensional Coulomb gas with logarithmically correlated disorder. We show that strong disorder results in a regime exhibiting VFT criticality instead of the usual BKT one, and find that it corresponds to transition to a nonergodic insulator phase.

5 pages, 1 figure, Supplementary files included

References in corpus (17)

• Metal-insulator transition in a weakly interacting many-electron system with localized single-particle states
• Interacting electrons in disordered wires: Anderson localization and low-temperature transport
• Superconductivity-Related Insulating Behavior
• Localized Superconductivity in the Quantum-Critical Region of the Disorder-Driven Superconductor-Insulator Transition in TiN Thin Films
• Non-ergodic phases in strongly disordered random regular graphs
• Gauge Theories of Josephson Junction Arrays
• Evidence for a Finite Temperature Insulator
• Many body localization with long range interactions
• Weakly interacting Bose gas in a random environment
• Superconducting phase transitions in ultrathin TiN films
• A mean-field theory of nearly many-body localized metals
• Vortex statistics in a disordered two-dimensional XY model
• Superinsulator-Superconductor Duality in Two Dimensions
• Topological transitions and freezing in XY models and Coulomb gases with quenched disorder: renormalization via traveling waves
• Superinsulator Phase of Two-Dimensional Superconductors
• Transport properties of clean and disordered Josephson junction arrays
• Magnetic field-dependent inhomogeneities and their effect on the magnetoresponse of 2D superconductors

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Magnetic field induced transition from a vortex liquid to Bose metal in ultrathin a-MoGe thin film
• Keldysh field theory of a driven dissipative Mott insulator: nonequilibrium response and phase transitions
• Time scales in the thermal dynamics of magnetic dipolar clusters
• On the Formation of Solid States Beyond Perfect Crystals: Quasicrystals, Geometrically-Frustrated Crystals and Glasses