Hysteretic Depinning and Dynamical Melting for Magnetically Interacting Vortices in Disordered Layered Superconductors

We examine the depinning transitions and the temperature versus driving force phase diagram for magnetically interacting pancake vortices in layered superconductors. For strong disorder the initial depinning is plastic followed by a sharp hysteretic transition to a three-dimensional ordered state for increasing driving force. Our results are in good agreement with theoretical predictions for driven anisotropic charge-density wave systems. We also show that a temperature induced peak effect in the critical current occurs due to the onset of plasticity between the layers.