Díaz-Méndez Rogelio, Mezzacapo Fabio, Lechner Wolfgang, Cinti Fabio, Babaev Egor, Pupillo Guido
icFRC, IPCMS (UMR 7504), ISIS (UMR 7006), Université de Strasbourg and CNRS, 67000 Strasbourg, France.
IQOQI and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Feb 10;118(6):067001. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.067001. Epub 2017 Feb 8.
At low enough temperatures and high densities, the equilibrium configuration of an ensemble of ultrasoft particles is a self-assembled, ordered, cluster crystal. In the present Letter, we explore the out-of-equilibrium dynamics for a two-dimensional realization, which is relevant to superconducting materials with multiscale intervortex forces. We find that, for small temperatures following a quench, the suppression of the thermally activated particle hopping hinders the ordering. This results in a glass transition for a monodispersed ensemble, for which we derive a microscopic explanation in terms of an "effective polydispersity" induced by multiscale interactions. This demonstrates that a vortex glass can form in clean systems of thin films of "type-1.5" superconductors. An additional setup to study this physics can be layered superconducting systems, where the shape of the effective vortex-vortex interactions can be engineered.
