Abstract
With magnetic force microscopy in mind, we study the unbinding transition of individual flux lines from extended defects like columnar pins and twin planes in type-II superconductors. In the presence of point disorder, the transition is universal with an exponent which depends only on the dimensionality of the extended defect. We also consider the unbinding transition of a single vortex line from a twin plane occupied by other vortices. We show that the critical properties of this transition depend strongly on the Luttinger liquid parameter which describes the long-distance physics of the two-dimensional flux line array.
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