Melting of the Vortex Lattice through Intermediate Hexatic Fluid in an a−MoGe Thin Film
Indranil Roy, Surajit Dutta, Aditya N. Roy Choudhury, Somak Basistha, Ilaria Maccari, Soumyajit Mandal, John Jesudasan, Vivas Bagwe, Claudio Castellani, Lara Benfatto, Pratap Raychaudhuri
2019
Physical Review Letters
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
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... otropic 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.
doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.047001
fatcat:i5xa5x77jfhuzedemfaaxgg6t4