Charge density glass from fictions to facts

Thirty years ago Fukuyama [J. Phys. Soc. Jpn.45 (1978) 1474] predicted a transition from charge density wave (CDW) state to the charge density glass (CDG) at a finite temperature as the consequence of the competition between the uniform commensurability pinning and the random impurity pinning. We present strong evidence that the CDG phase indeed exists as a generic feature of density wave systems. However, it arises from the competition of the random impurity pinning and the electrostatic intra-CDW interaction which tends to establish a uniform phase at low temperature. The glass transition occurs at the temperature at which the free carriers cannot efficiently screen the phase distortions. The characteristic length scale of the disorder, i.e. the size of the phase coherent domains, governs the glass properties. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.