Coulombian Disorder in Periodic Systems

Edmond Orignac 1, Alberto Rosso 2, R. Chitra 3, T. Giamarchi 4

Physical Review B 73 (2006) 035112

We study the effect of unscreened charged impurities on periodic systems. We show that the long wavelength component of the disorder becomes long ranged and dominates static correlation functions. On the other hand, because of the statistical tilt symmetry, dynamical properties such as pinning remain unaffected. As a concrete example, we focus on the effect of Coulombian disorder generated by charged impurities, on 3D charge density waves with non local elasticity. We calculate the x-ray intensity and find that it is identical to the one produced by thermal fluctuations in a disorder-free smectic-A. We discuss the consequences of these results for experiments.

  • 1. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l’ENS (LPTENS),
    CNRS : UMR8549 – Université Paris VI – Pierre et Marie Curie – Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris – ENS Paris
  • 2. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS),
    CNRS : UMR8626 – Université Paris XI – Paris Sud
  • 3. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique des Liquides (LPTL),
    CNRS : UMR7600 – Université Paris VI – Pierre et Marie Curie
  • 4. Departement de Physique de la Matiere Condensee (DPMC),
    University of Geneva
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