English

Disordered BKT transition and superinsulation

Superconductivity 2018-01-31 v2 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.00555,
  title  = {Disordered BKT transition and superinsulation},
  author = {Sarath Sankar and Valerii Vinokur and Vikram Tripathi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.00555},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure, Supplementary files included

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:07:08.516Z