The hexatic fluid refers to a phase in between a solid and a liquid which has short range positional order but quasi-long range orientational order. In the celebrated theory of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz and Thouless and subsequently refined by Halperin, Nelson and Young, it was predicted that a 2-dimensional hexagonal solid can melt in two steps: first, through a transformation from a solid to a hexatic fluid which retains quasi long range orientational order and then from a hexatic fluid to an isotropic liquid. In this paper, using a combination of real space imaging and transport measurements we show that the 2dimensional vortex lattice in a-MoGe thin film follows this sequence of melting as the magnetic field is increased. Identifying the signatures of various transitions on the bulk transport properties of the superconductor, we construct a vortex phase diagram for a two dimensional superconductor.
When a magnetic field is applied, the mixed state of a conventional Type II superconductor gets destroyed at the upper critical field Hc2, where the normal vortex cores overlap with each other.Here, we show that in the presence of weak and homogeneous disorder the destruction of superconductivity with field follows a different route. Starting with a weakly disordered NbN thin film ( Tc ~ 9K ), we show that under the application of magnetic field the superconducting state becomes increasingly granular, where lines of vortices separate the superconducting islands.Consequently, phase fluctuations between these islands give rise to a field induced pseudogap state, which has a gap in the electronic density of states but where the global zero resistance state is destroyed.
We investigate the magnetic field variation of the thermally activated flux flow resistivity, ρ TAFF and flux flow critical current density, J c , in a weakly pinned thin film of the amorphous superconductor aMoGe, where vortices are in a fluid state over a large range of magnetic fields. We show that both quantities can be understood within the framework of collective pinning theory. In particular, our results demonstrate that a 'peak effect' can arise at the order-disorder transition of the vortex lattice even when both the ordered and disordered states are vortex fluids, such as the boundary between a hexatic vortex fluid and an isotropic vortex liquid.
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