Unveiling the vortex glass phase in the surface and volume of a type-II superconductor

Abstract

Order-disorder transitions between glassy phases are quite common in nature and yet a comprehensive survey of the microscopic structural changes remains elusive since the scale of the constituents is tiny and in most cases few of them take part in the transformation. Vortex matter in type-II superconductors is a model system where some of the experimental challenges inherent to this general question can be tackled by adequately choosing the host superconducting sample. For instance, Bi${}_2$Sr${}_2$CaCu${}_2$O${}_{8+\delta }$ is a type-II superconductor with weak point disorder that presents a transition between two glassy phases on increasing the constituents' (vortices) density. At low vortex densities, the impact of disorder produces the nucleation of a glassy yet quasi-crystalline phase, the Bragg glass. For high vortex densities the stable phase, coined as $\text{vortex glass}$, was proposed to be disordered, but its structural properties have remained elusive up to now. Here we answer this question by combining surface and bulk vortex imaging techniques, and show that the vortex glass is neither a messy nor a hexatic phase: in the plane of vortices it presents large crystallites with positional correlations growing algebraically and short-ranged orientational order. However, no dramatic change in the correlation length along the direction of vortices is observed on traversing the order-disorder transformation.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Nearly hyperuniform, nonhyperuniform, and antihyperuniform density fluctuations in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides with defects
• Disordered hyperuniform vortex matter with rhombic distortions in FeSe at low fields
• Disordered Hyperuniform Quasi-1D Materials
• Order-disorder transitions in a polar vortex lattice
• Anisotropic suppression of hyperuniformity of elastic systems in media with planar disorder
• Non-Gaussian tail in the force distribution: A hallmark of correlated disorder in the host media of elastic objects
• Finite-size effects in hyperuniform vortex matter
• Anti-hyperuniform diluted vortex matter induced by correlated disorder
• Spectral Leakage and Masking Effects in the Measurement of Hyperuniformity
• Second ac screening step as a probe for the first-order melting transition in layered vortex matter at intermediate temperatures
• Bridge in micron-sized Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+y sample act as converging lens for vortices
• Hyperuniform patterns nucleated at low temperatures: Insight from vortex matter imaged in unprecedentedly large fields-of-view