Monte Carlo simulation of a two-dimensional continuum Coulomb gas

Abstract

We study the classical two-dimensional Coulomb gas model for thermal vortex fluctuations in thin superconducting/superfluid films by Monte Carlo simulation of a grand canonical vortex ensemble defined on a continuum. The Kosterlitz-Thouless transition is well understood at low vortex density, but at high vortex density the nature of the phase diagram and of the vortex phase transition is less clear. From our Monte Carlo data we construct phase diagrams for the 2D Coulomb gas without any restrictions on the vortex density. For negative vortex chemical potential (positive vortex core energy) we always find a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. Only if the Coulomb interaction is supplemented with a short-distance repulsion, a first order transition line is found, above some positive value of the vortex chemical potential.

10 pages RevTeX, 7 postscript figures included using epsf

References in corpus (4)

• Spontaneous Inter-layer Coherence in Double-Layer Quantum-Hall Systems I: Charged Vortices and Kosterlitz-Thouless Phase Transitions
• Hyperfine Populations Prior to Muon Capture
• Quantum Ferromagnetism and Phase Transitions in Double-Layer Quantum Hall Systems
• Generalization of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless theory to higher vortex densities

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• Screening properties and phase transitions in unconventional plasmas for Ising-type quantum Hall states
• Quasi Long Range Order and Vortex Lattice in the Three State Potts Model
• Modeling and simulations of quantum phase slips in ultrathin superconducting wires
• Topological Phase Transition in a Quasi Two Dimensional Coulomb Gas
• Vortex supersolid in the XY model with tunable vortex fugacity
• Scaling of the magnetic permeability at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition from Coulomb gas simulations