Category: Physics

Summary: Testing whether moderate stripe-correlated pinning suppresses final vortex density more strongly than IID disorder during a finite-rate 2D XY quench.

Topological defects in the two-dimensional XY model are a classic probe of nonequilibrium ordering. This experiment asks how vortex formation changes when pinning disorder is not random site by site, but arranged in stripe-correlated patterns that bias coarsening along a preferred direction during cooling.

The simulation performs finite-rate quenches and compares stripe-correlated pinning with IID disorder across quench times and pinning strengths. The hypothesis is that moderate anisotropy can help domains coarsen with fewer final vortices, while very strong stripes can instead trap frustrated domain walls and reintroduce defects.

That makes the project a competition between guided coarsening and frozen frustration. The output is meant to show whether structured disorder changes Kibble-Zurek-like defect formation in a way that simple uncorrelated pinning does not.

Method: GPU-accelerated finite-rate quenches of a 2D XY-like phase field, comparing stripe-correlated and IID pinning disorder across quench times and pinning strengths.

What is measured: Final vortex density, dependence on quench time, effect of stripe anisotropy versus IID pinning, and indicators of stripe-frustrated domain-wall freezing.