Excess of topological defects induced by confinement in vortex nanocrystals

We directly image individual vortex positions in nanocrystals in order to unveil the structural property that contributes to the depletion of the entropy-jump entailed at the first-order transition. On reducing the nanocrystal size the density of topological defects increases near the edges over a c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2017-04
Main Authors: N R Cejas Bolecek, Dolz, M I, Pastoriza, H, Konczykowski, M, C J van der Beek, Kolton, A B, Fasano, Y
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Defects
Depletion
Entropy
Healing
Nanocrystals
Topology
Vortices
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We directly image individual vortex positions in nanocrystals in order to unveil the structural property that contributes to the depletion of the entropy-jump entailed at the first-order transition. On reducing the nanocrystal size the density of topological defects increases near the edges over a characteristic length. Within this "healing-length" distance from the sample edge vortex rows tend to bend while towards the center of the sample the positional order of the vortex structure is what is expected for the Bragg-glass phase. This suggests that the healing-length may be a key quantity to model the entropy-jump depletion in the first-order transition of extremely-layered vortex nanocrystals.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1704.01040