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Register a new userThermally rounded depinning of an elastic interface on a washboard potential
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Added by
Alejandro B. Kolton
Publication date
2020
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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The thermal rounding of the depinning transition of an elastic interface sliding on a washboard potential is studied through analytic arguments and very accurate numerical simulations. We confirm the standard view that well below the depinning threshold the average velocity can be calculated considering thermally activated nucleation of forward moving defects. However, we find that the straightforward extension of this analysis to near or above the depinning threshold does not fully describe the physics of the thermally assisted motion. In particular, we find that exactly at the depinning point the average velocity does not follow a pure power-law of the temperature as naively expected by the analogy with standard phase transitions but presents subtle logarithmic corrections. We explain the physical mechanisms behind these corrections and argue that they are non-peculiar collective effects which may also apply to the case of interfaces sliding on uncorrelated disordered landscapes.
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We study numerically the depinning transition of driven elastic interfaces in a random-periodic medium with localized periodic-correlation peaks in the direction of motion. The analysis of the moving interface geometry reveals the existence of several characteristic lengths separating different length-scale regimes of roughness. We determine the scaling behavior of these lengths as a function of the velocity, temperature, driving force, and transverse periodicity. A dynamical roughness diagram is thus obtained which contains, at small length scales, the critical and fast-flow regimes typical of the random-manifold (or domain wall) depinning, and at large length-scales, the critical and fast-flow regimes typical of the random-periodic (or charge-density wave) depinning. From the study of the equilibrium geometry we are also able to infer the roughness diagram in the creep regime, extending the depinning roughness diagram below threshold. Our results are relevant for understanding the geometry at depinning of arrays of elastically coupled thin manifolds in a disordered medium such as driven particle chains or vortex-line planar arrays. They also allow to properly control the effect of transverse periodic boundary conditions in large-scale simulations of driven disordered interfaces.
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We study relaxation dynamics of a three dimensional elastic manifold in random potential from a uniform initial condition by numerically solving the Langevin equation.We observe growth of roughness of the system up to larger wavelengths with time.We analyze structure factor in detail and find a compact scaling ansatz describing two distinct time regimes and crossover between them. We find short time regime corresponding to length scale smaller than the Larkin length $L_c$ is well described by the Larkin model which predicts a power law growth of domain size $L(t)$. Longer time behavior exhibits the random manifold regime with slower growth of $L(t)$.
We study numerically thermal effects at the depinning transition of an elastic string driven in a two-dimensional uncorrelated disorder potential. The velocity of the string exactly at the sample critical force is shown to behave as $V sim T^psi$, with $psi$ the thermal rounding exponent. We show that the computed value of the thermal rounding exponent, $psi = 0.15$, is robust and accounts for the different scaling properties of several observables both in the steady-state and in the transient relaxation to the steady-state. In particular, we show the compatibility of the thermal rounding exponent with the scaling properties of the steady-state structure factor, the universal short-time dynamics of the transient velocity at the sample critical force, and the velocity scaling function describing the joint dependence of the steady-state velocity on the external drive and temperature.
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