Emergent power-law interactions in near-crystalline membranes.

Abstract

We derive exact results for the fluctuations in energy produced by microscopic disorder in near-crystalline athermal systems. Our formalism captures the heterogeneity in the elastic energy of polydisperse soft disks in energy-minimized configurations. We use this to predict the distribution of interaction energy between two defects in a disordered background. We show that this interaction energy displays a disorder-averaged power-law behavior 〈δE〉∼Δ^{-4} at large distances Δ between the defects. These interactions upon disorder average also display the sixfold symmetry of the underlying reference crystal. Additionally, we show that the fluctuations in the interaction energy encode the athermal correlations introduced by the disordered background. We verify our predictions with energy-minimized configurations of polydisperse soft disks in two dimensions.