5,748 research outputs found
Stability of Elastic Glass Phases in Random Field XY Magnets and Vortex Lattices in Type II Superconductors
A description of a dislocation-free elastic glass phase in terms of domain
walls is developed and used as the basis of a renormalization group analysis of
the energetics of dislocation loops added to the system. It is found that even
after optimizing over possible paths of large dislocation loops, their energy
is still very likely to be positive when the dislocation core energy is large.
This implies the existence of an equilibrium elastic glass phase in three
dimensional random field X-Y magnets, and a dislocation free,
bond-orientationally ordered ``Bragg glass'' phase of vortices in dirty Type II
superconductors.Comment: 12 pages, Revtex, no figures, submitted to Phys Rev Letter
Stripes Disorder and Correlation lengths in doped antiferromagnets
For stripes in doped antiferromagnets, we find that the ratio of spin and
charge correlation lenghts, , provide a sharp criterion for
determining the dominant form of disorder in the system. If stripes disorder is
controlled by topological defects then . In contast,
if stripes correlations are disordered primarily by non-topological elastic
deformations (i.e., a Bragg-Glass type of disorder) then is expected. Therefore, the observation of in and in invariably implies that the stripes
are in a Bragg glass type state, and topological defects are much less relevant
than commonly assumed. Expected spectral properties are discussed. Thus, we
establish the basis for any theoretical analysis of the experimentally
obsereved glassy state in these material.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Goldstone-type fluctuations and their implications for the amorphous solid state
In sufficiently high spatial dimensions, the formation of the amorphous (i.e.
random) solid state of matter, e.g., upon sufficent crosslinking of a
macromolecular fluid, involves particle localization and, concommitantly, the
spontaneous breakdown of the (global, continuous) symmetry of translations.
Correspondingly, the state supports Goldstone-type low energy, long wave-length
fluctuations, the structure and implications of which are identified and
explored from the perspective of an appropriate replica field theory. In terms
of this replica perspective, the lost symmetry is that of relative translations
of the replicas; common translations remain as intact symmetries, reflecting
the statistical homogeneity of the amorphous solid state. What emerges is a
picture of the Goldstone-type fluctuations of the amorphous solid state as
shear deformations of an elastic medium, along with a derivation of the shear
modulus and the elastic free energy of the state. The consequences of these
fluctuations -- which dominate deep inside the amorphous solid state -- for the
order parameter of the amorphous solid state are ascertained and interpreted in
terms of their impact on the statistical distribution of localization lengths,
a central diagnostic of the the state. The correlations of these order
parameter fluctuations are also determined, and are shown to contain
information concerning further diagnostics of the amorphous solid state, such
as spatial correlations in the statistics of the localization characteristics.
Special attention is paid to the properties of the amorphous solid state in two
spatial dimensions, for which it is shown that Goldstone-type fluctuations
destroy particle localization, the order parameter is driven to zero, and
power-law order-parameter correlations hold.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure
Deformation of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal induced by cylindrical surface
Department of PhysicsInterfaces, where liquid crystals (LCs) is in contact with other materials, play a pivotal role in most LCbased applications such as displays and sensors. Physicochemical properties of interfaces impose a surface anchoring, and the geometry and topology of confining interfaces determine LC???s director configuration and defects. To our interest, the concavely curved interface with anisotropic curvatures gives rise to a so-called surface-elasticity phenomenon. In this work, we report the director configuration around a cylindrical object embedded in nematic Sunset Yellow (SSY), a representative lyotropic chromonic LC with the large K24 modulus. The nematic SSY is sandwiched between two flat substrates, and a cylinder is placed in the SSY. The flat boundaries induce a homogeneous director field orthogonal to the cylinder???s axis, whereas the cylinder aligns neighboring directors parallel to its axis, based on the theory related with K24. These boundary conditions result in the twist deformation near the cylinder, and we investigate the deformation experimentally and theoretically, and evaluate K24 of SSY.clos
Equation of state for polymer liquid crystals: theory and experiment
The first part of this paper develops a theory for the free energy of
lyotropic polymer nematic liquid crystals. We use a continuum model with
macroscopic elastic moduli for a polymer nematic phase. By evaluating the
partition function, considering only harmonic fluctuations, we derive an
expression for the free energy of the system. We find that the configurational
entropic part of the free energy enhances the effective repulsive interactions
between the chains. This configurational contribution goes as the fourth root
of the direct interactions. Enhancement originates from the coupling between
bending fluctuations and the compressibility of the nematic array normal to the
average director. In the second part of the paper we use osmotic stress to
measure the equation of state for DNA liquid crystals in 0.1M to 1M NaCl
solutions. These measurements cover 5 orders of magnitude in DNA osmotic
pressure. At high osmotic pressures the equation of state, dominated by
exponentially decaying hydration repulsion, is independent of the ionic
strength. At lower pressures the equation of state is dominated by fluctuation
enhanced electrostatic double layer repulsion. The measured equation of state
for DNA fits well with our theory for all salt concentrations. We are able to
extract the strength of the direct electrostatic double layer repulsion. This
is a new and alternative way of measuring effective charge densities along
semiflexible polyelectrolytes.Comment: text + 5 figures. Submitted to PR
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