Unzipping a Luttinger liquid

Full Text:With magnetic force microscopy experiments in mind, the unzipping of individual flux lines from extended defects (columnar pins and twin planes) in superconductors will be considered. It will be shown that the critical exponents characterizing the unbinding transition of a single flux-line from a twin plane are very sensitive to the presence of other flux lines in the plane. In particular they serve as an extremely sensitive probe of the Luttinger liquid parameter which characterizes the physics of vortex lines in two dimensions. In addition, the effects of point disorder on the critical properties of the unzipping transition from both a columnar pin and a twin plane will be discussed