Critical Transverse Forces in Weakly Pinned Driven Vortex Systems

Abstract

We present simulation results of the moving Bragg glass regime of a driven two-dimensional vortex system in the presence of a smoothly varying weak pinning potential. We study the critical transverse force and (i) demonstrate that it can be an order of magnitude larger than previous estimates (ii) show that it is still observable when the system is driven along low higher-order lattice vectors. We confirm theoretical predictions that the critical transverse force is the order parameter of the so-called moving glass phase, and provide data to support experimentalists verifying the existence of a critical transverse force.