相关论文: Fluctuations and Intrinsic Pinning in Layered Supe…

A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductor with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. Similar order can arise in low temperature $^4$He films with a highly anisotropic periodic…

In a type II superconductor in a moderate magnetic field, the superconductor to normal state transition may be described as a phase transition in which the vortex lattice melts into a liquid. In a biaxial superconductor, or even a uniaxial…

Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…

We study smectic-liquid-crystal order in a cell with a heterogeneous substrate imposing surface random positional and orientational pinnings. Proposing a minimal random elastic model, we demonstrate that, for a thick cell, the smectic state…

Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…

Chiral liquid crystals often exhibit periodic modulations in the molecular director; in particular, thin films of the smectic-C* phase show a chiral striped texture. Here, we investigate whether similar chiral modulations can occur in the…

We present a theory of the electron smectic fixed point of the stripe phases of doped layered Mott insulators. We show that in the presence of a spin gap three phases generally arise: (a) a smectic superconductor, (b) an insulating stripe…

The smectic C (smC) phase represents a unique class of liquid crystal phases characterised by the layered arrangement of molecules with tilted orientations with respect to layer normals. Building upon the real-valued tensorial smectic A…

We explore the smectic liquid crystal order in a cell with a "dirty" substrate imposing random pinnings. Within harmonic elasticity we find a subtle three-dimensional surface disorder-driven transition into a pinned smectic-glass,…

The order parameters for the phenomenological description of the smectic-{\it A} to smectic-{\it C} phase transition are formulated on the basis of molecular symmetry and structure. It is shown that, unless the long molecular axis is an…

Liquid crystals can self-organize into a layered smectic phase. While the smectic layers are typically straight forming a lamellar pattern in bulk, external confinement may drastically distort the layers due to the boundary conditions…

By the density functional theory for crystallization, it is shown that for vortex lines in an underlying layered structure a smectic phase with period m=2 can be stabilized by strong layer pinning. The freezing of vortex liquid is then…

The flux line lattice melting transition in two-dimensional pure and disordered superconductors is studied by a Monte Carlo simulation using the lowest Landau level approximation and quasi-periodic boundary condition on a plane. The…

The phase diagram of a driven two-dimensional vortex lattice in the presence of dense quasi-point pins is investigated. The transition from the crystal to the liquid is found continuous at intermediate inductions. The correlations in the…

Electronic nematic and smectic liquid crystals are spontaneous symmetry-breaking phases that are seen to precede or coexist with enigmatic unconventional superconducting states in multiple classes of materials. In this Letter we describe…

Smectic order has been generated in superconducting Nb films with two-fold symmetry arrays of symmetric pinning centers. Magnetic fields applied perpendicularly to the films develop a vortex matter smectic phase that is easily detected when…

We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…

Thermal fluctuations and disorder play an essential role in high-T$_c$ superconductors. After reviewing the mean-field phase diagram we describe significant modifications that result when the effects of finite temperature and disorder are…

Magneto-optical observations of a second flux front, which occurs at the second peak in the magnetization of Bi_2 Sr_2 CaCu_2 O_x single crystals related to the known first order ``vortex-lattice melting'', are reconsidered. We show that,…

We consider a two-dimensional disordered conductor in the regime when the superconducting phase is destroyed by the magnetic field. We analyze a combination of fluctuations of different origin which results in an effective interaction…