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Melting of the vortex lattice through intermediate hexatic fluid in a-MoGe thin film

Authors :
Roy, Indranil
Dutta, Surajit
Choudhury, Aditya N. Roy
Basistha, Somak
Maccari, Ilaria
Mandal, Soumyajit
Jesudasan, John
Bagwe, Vivas
Castellani, Claudio
Benfatto, Lara
Raychaudhuri, Pratap
Source :
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 047001 (2019)
Publication Year :
2018

Abstract

The hexatic fluid refers to a phase in between a solid and a liquid which has short range positional order but quasi-long range orientational order. In the celebrated theory of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless and subsequently refined by Halperin, Nelson and Young, it was predicted that a 2-dimensional hexagonal solid can melt in two steps: first, through a transformation from a solid to a hexatic fluid which retains quasi long range orientational order and then from a hexatic fluid to an isotropic liquid. In this paper, using a combination of real space imaging and transport measurements we show that the 2-dimensional vortex lattice in a-MoGe thin film follows this sequence of melting as the magnetic field is increased. Identifying the signatures of various transitions on the bulk transport properties of the superconductor, we construct a vortex phase diagram for a two dimensional superconductor.<br />Comment: New Data added in this version

Details

Database :
arXiv
Journal :
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 047001 (2019)
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.1805.05193
Document Type :
Working Paper
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.047001