| Melting transitions are of great technical importance and thus in the focus of current theoretical and experimental research. Beside the ordinary melting transition in crystals there is an increasing interest in melting processes in other regular lattices formed at low temperatures by vortices in rotating Bose Einstein condensates or in high-temperature superconductors. These can be described efficiently by defect models in which the transitions are caused by the proliferation of defects. In addition one must include the effect of pinning by impurities to obtain the experimentally observed phase diagrams including glass transitions. |
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