Fluctuations and Intrinsic Pinning in Layered Superconductors

Abstract

A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductors with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. If the smectic order is commensurate with the layering, this crystal is {\sl stable} to point disorder. By tilting and adjusting the magnitude of the applied field, both incommensurate and tilted smectic and crystalline phases are found. We discuss transport near the second order smectic freezing transition, and show that permeation modes lead to a small non--zero resistivity and large but finite tilt modulus in the smectic crystal.