Making progress in studying the interplay between disorder and fluctuations is challenged by the complexity of extracting robust insights from experiments affected by noise and finite resolution.
This has hindered observations of the Bragg glass phase, which is predicted to occur in vortex lattices and charge density wave systems in the presence of disorder. Despite its sharp theoretical definition in terms of diverging correlation lengths, establishing the existence of the Bragg glass phase in a charge density wave system has been challenging. Here, we present the first bulk probe evidence of a Bragg glass phase in the systematically disordered
CDW material Pd
ErTe<3> using comprehensive x-ray data and a novel machine learning data analysis tool,
X-ray Temperature Clustering (X-TEC).
Using data from 20,000 Brillouin zones readily analyzed using X-TEC, we establish a diverging correlation length in samples with moderate intercalation over a wide temperature range. To enable such comprehensive analysis, we introduced a new high-throughput measure of inverse correlation length: "peak-spread".
The detection of Bragg glass order and the resulting phase diagram advance our understanding of the complex interplay between disorder and fluctuations significantly. Moreover, the use of X-TEC to target fluctuations through a high-throughput measure of "peak spread" can revolutionize how the fluctuations are studied in scattering experiments.