2020/07/06 by Jazmín Aragón Sánchez, Gonzalo Rumi, Raúl Cortés Maldonado +15 · 6 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Condensed matter physics #Distribution (mathematics) #Gaussian #Geometry #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Mechanics #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Point (geometry) #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Statistical physics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Vortex #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41598-020-76529-w
published in Scientific Reports 10(1), 19452 (Nature Portfolio) · 12 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2020/07/06 · openalex publication_date 2020/11/10 · arxiv updated 2020/11/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Inferring the nature of disorder in the media where elastic objects are nucleated is of crucial importance for many applications but remains a challenging basic-science problem. Here we propose a method to discern whether weak-point or strong-correlated disorder dominates based on characterizing the distribution of the interaction forces between objects mapped in large fields-of-view. We illustrate our proposal with the case-study system of vortex structures nucleated in type-II superconductors with different pinning landscapes. Interaction force distributions are computed from individual vortex positions imaged in thousands-vortices fields-of-view in a two-orders-of-magnitude-wide vortex-density range. Vortex structures nucleated in point-disordered media present Gaussian distributions of the interaction force components. In contrast, if the media have dilute and randomly-distributed correlated disorder, these distributions present non-Gaussian algebraically-decaying tails for large force magnitudes. We propose that detecting this deviation from the Gaussian behavior is a fingerprint of strong disorder, in our case originated from a dilute distribution of correlated pinning centers.