Jami Prashanti

The study of two-dimensional (2D) melting has drawn significant research interest over a long time because of its defect-mediated description given by Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) theory, which yields an exotic hexatic phase sandwiched between the solid and liquid. The hexatic phase is promoted by the thermal unbinding of dislocation pairs, followed by the proliferation of free disclinations on entering the normal fluid. This is quite unlike their 3D counterparts undergoing a first-order direct melting between solid and liquid. There has been significant research on KTHNY-physics in microscopic models of classical systems. However, the role of disorder in the different phases and the phase transitions needs careful studies. We are interested in looking into the role of disorder in 2D bulk systems interacting through softcore potential, for which a KTHNY description is already established in clean systems. Together with studying bulk systems, we also considered the impact of disorder's inherent characteristics on the universal characteristics of the spatiotemporal correlations of two-dimensional Coulomb-clusters, which essentially display glassy dynamics. We performed both MD and non-linear dynamic analysis for addressing this problem .