title: Thermodynamic fingerprints of disorder in flux line lattices and other glassy mesoscopic systems
abstract: We examine probability distributions for thermodynamic quantities in finite-sized random systems close to criticality. Guided by available exact results, a general ansatz is proposed for replicated free energies, which leads to scaling forms for cumulants of various macroscopic observables. For the specific example of a planar flux line lattice in a two-dimensional superconducting film near H(c1), we provide detailed scaling results for the statistics of the magnetic flux density, susceptibility, heat capacity, and their cross correlations, which can be tested in a recently used experimental setup [Bolle et al., Nature (London) 399, 43 (1999)].
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Emig
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kardar