Specific Heat of Classical Disordered Elastic Systems

We study the thermodynamics of disordered elastic systems, applied to vortex lattices in the Bragg glass phase. Using the replica variational method we compute the specific heat of pinned vortons in the classical limit. We find that the contribution of disorder is positive, linear at low temperature, and exhibits a maximum. It is found to be important compared to other contributions, e.g., core electrons, mean field, and nonlinear elasticity that we evaluate. The contribution of droplets is subdominant at weak disorder in $d=3$.

Figure 1

Specific heat $C_v(T)-C_{\mathrm{e}\mathrm{q}}$ in arbitrary units as a function of $T/T^{*}$.