title: Instabilities and disorder-driven first-order transition of the vortex lattice
abstract: Transport studies in a Corbino disk suggest that the Bragg glass phase undergoes a first-order transition into a disordered solid. This transition shows sharp reentrant behavior at low fields. In contrast, in the conventional strip configuration, the phase transition is obscured by the injection of the disordered vortices through the sample edges, which results in the commonly observed vortex instabilities and smearing of the peak effect in NbSe2 crystals. These features are found to be absent in the Corbino geometry in which the circulating vortices do not cross the sample edges.
authors.affiliation: Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel.
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Paltiel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zeldov
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Myasoedov
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Rappaport
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bhattacharya
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Higgins
authors.initials: ZL
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.initials: EY
authors.lastname: Andrei
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Gammel
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Bishop