We show that the competition between interactions on different length scales, as relevant for the formation of stripes in doped Mott insulators, can cause a glass transition in a system with no explicitly quenched disorder. We analytically determine a universal criterion for the emergence of an exponentially large number of metastable configurations that leads to a finite configurational entropy and a landscape dominated viscous flow. We demonstrate that glassiness is unambiguously tied to a new length scale which characterizes the typical length over which defects and imperfections in the stripe pattern are allowed to wander over long times.

• Received 15 February 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.64.174203