Y. Paltiel,1 E. Zeldov,1 Y. Myasoedov,1 M.
L. Rappaport,1 G. Jung,1,2 S. Bhattacharya,3,4 M. J. Higgins,3 Z. L. Xiao,5
E. Y.
Andrei,5 P. L. Gammel,6 and D. J. Bishop6
1Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann
Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
2Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel
3NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
4Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai-400005,
India
5Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers
University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08855
6Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray
Hill, New Jersey 07974
Transport studies in a Corbino disk suggest that the Bragg glass phase
undergoes a first-order transition into a disordered solid. This
transition shows sharp reentrant behavior at low fields. In contrast,
in the conventional strip configuration, the phase transition is obscured
by the injection of the disordered vortices through the sample edges,
which results in the commonly observed vortex instabilities and
smearing of the peak effect in NbSe2 crystals. These features are found
to be absent in the Corbino geometry in which the circulating
vortices do not cross the sample edges.