Harvard Condensed Matter Theory Seminars

Abstract

Cynthia Reichhardt, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Local probes at the nanoscale: Entanglement, melting, and jamming transitions

Driving a single particle through a system offers a powerful experimental probe of the nonequilibrium dynamics of a nanoscale medium. Due to recent technical advances, magnetic force microscopy (MFM) can be used to manipulate individual magnetic vortices in a superconductor. We propose an experiment to resolve the controversial issue of whether vortices can entangle like polymers by using an MFM tip to wind one vortex around another and create an artificially entangled vortex state. We also use simulations of local probes to explore other phenomena, including local melting transitions, diverging length scales at jamming transitions, and nonequilibrium ordering transitions.