Coulombian Disorder in Periodic Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how unscreened charged impurities, specifically Coulombian disorder, influence the static and dynamic properties of periodic systems like 3D charge density waves, revealing that long-range disorder affects static correlations but not dynamical behaviors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Coulombian disorder creates long-range effects on static correlations without impacting dynamical properties due to statistical tilt symmetry.

Findings

Long wavelength disorder becomes long ranged and dominates static correlations.

Dynamical properties such as pinning remain unaffected by Coulombian disorder.

X-ray intensity in the presence of Coulombian disorder mimics thermal fluctuations in a disorder-free system.

Abstract

We study the effect of unscreened charged impurities on periodic systems. We show that the long wavelength component of the disorder becomes long ranged and dominates static correlation functions. On the other hand, because of the statistical tilt symmetry, dynamical properties such as pinning remain unaffected. As a concrete example, we focus on the effect of Coulombian disorder generated by charged impurities, on 3D charge density waves with non local elasticity. We calculate the x-ray intensity and find that it is identical to the one produced by thermal fluctuations in a disorder-free smectic-A. We discuss the consequences of these results for experiments.