Replica Symmetry Breaking in Renormalization: Application to the Randomly Pinned Planar Flux Array

(Received 15 October 1994, received in final form 2 November 1994, accepted 15 November 1994)

Abstract
The randomly pinned planar flux line array is supposed to show a phase transition to a vortex glass phase at low temperatures. This transition has been examined by using a mapping onto a 2D XY-model with random anisotropy but without vortices and applying a renormalization group treatment to the replicated Hamiltonian based on the mapping to a Coulomb gas of vector charges. This renormalization group approach is extended by deriving renormalization group flow equations which take into account the possibility of a one-step replica symmetry breaking. It is shown that the renormalization group flow is unstable with respect to replica asymmetric perturbations and new fixed points with a broken replica symmetry are obtained. Approaching these fixed points the system can optimize its free energy contributions from fluctuations on large length scales; an optimal block size parameter m can be found. Correlation functions for the case of a broken replica symmetry can be calculated. We obtain both correlation diverging as ln  r and ln ² r depending on the choice of m.