Self-organizing stripe patterns in two-dimensional frustrated systems with competing interactions

Abstract

The formation of self-organizing stripe structures in a two-dimensional frustrated system with competing short-range attractive and long-range Coulomb repulsive interactions is investigated by continuous time Monte Carlo simulation technique. We find that intermediate between the frustrated meandering striped phase at low temperatures and the disordered phase at high temperatures is a highly oriented stripe phase where frustration-induced topological defects are effectively alleviated. The stability and the orientational ordering of stripe structures are mainly controlled by the temperature T, while the stripe thickness is determined by the strength of long-range repulsions g. A metastable branching stripe phase may appear between two ordered striped phases which are different in the width of the stripes. Furthermore, we obtain a complete $T\ensuremath{-}g$ phase diagram describing the striped phase transitions. Our results clearly indicate a possibility for the production of highly ordered and defect-free nanometer-scale materials with different sizes by tuning the temperature and the relative repulsion strengths, and provide an interesting and universal picture to account for striking and substantial physics revealed in the stripe patterns of soft materials.