University of California, Davis
Physics Department
Condensed Matter Seminar
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Dr. Helmut Katzgraber

Theoretische Physik, ETH Zurich

"Typical versus average superfluid density: Understanding the vortex glass phase"


There have been conflicting claims as to whether the superfluid density vanishes in the vortex glass phase, with Fisher, Fisher and Huse arguing that it is finite and Korshunov predicting that it is zero. As the vortex glass is commonly described by the gauge glass model, we numerically compute the superfluid density of this model by Monte Carlo simulations. Because the average free energy is independent of a twist angle, it is expected that the average superfluid density vanishes. This is not necessarily the case for the typical (median) value, which is non-zero, because the distribution of the superfluid density among different disorder realizations is very asymmetric. Finally, we show that the data for the superfluid density is well described by a generalized extreme value distribution with a nonzero "location parameter".

Thursday, May 13, 2004
4:10 p.m., 416 Phy/Geo