Defect pair in the elastic lattice of pancake vortices

An additional pancake-antipancake vortex pair is considered in the vortex lattice of layered superconductors. Within linear elastic continuum theory, the relaxation of the background lattice screens the long-range logarithmic interaction of the defect pair, reducing the factor ln(r0 /j) to ln(a/j) where r0 is the pair spacing, j the in-plane coherence length, and a the vortex spacing. The finite tilt modulus does not destroy this ideal two-dimensional screening, yielding a small correction ;(a/8pl)ln(r0 /a), which in principle is of long range, but has a very small prefactor when the vortex spacing a is smaller than the in-plane penetration depth l . @S0163-1829~97!02825-7#