Self-generated randomness, defect wandering, and viscous flow in stripe glasses

Abstract

We show that the competition between interactions on different length scales, as relevant for the formation of stripes in doped Mott insulators, can cause a glass transition in a system with no explicitly quenched disorder. We analytically determine a universal criterion for the emergence of an exponentially large number of metastable configurations that leads to a finite configurational entropy and a landscape dominated viscous flow. We demonstrate that glassiness is unambiguously tied to a new length scale which characterizes the typical length over which defects and imperfections in the stripe pattern are allowed to wander over long times.