Elastic Theory of pinned flux lattices

Abstract

The pinning of flux lattices by weak impurity disorder is studied in the absence of free dislocations using both the gaussian variational method and, to $O(\epsilon=4-d)$, the functional renormalization group. We find universal logarithmic growth of displacements for $2<d<4$: $\overline{\langle u(x)-u(0) \rangle ^2}\sim A_d \log|x|$ and persistence of algebraic quasi-long range translational order. When the two methods can be compared they agree within $10\%$ on the value of $A_d$. We compute the function describing the crossover between the ``random manifold'' regime and the logarithmic regime. This crossover should be observable in present decoration experiments.