Coulomb disorder in periodic systems: Effect of unscreened charged impurities

We study the effect of unscreened charged impurities on periodic systems. We show that the long-wavelength component of the disorder becomes long ranged and dominates static correlation functions. On the other hand, because of the statistical tilt symmetry, dynamical properties such as pinning remain unaffected. As a concrete example, we focus on the effect of Coulombian disorder generated by charged impurities on three-dimensional charge density waves with nonlocal elasticity. We calculate the x-ray intensity and find that it is identical to the one produced by thermal fluctuations in a disorder-free smectic-A phase. We discuss the consequences of these results for experiments