Effects of disorder on the wave front depinning transition in spatially discrete systems
Statistical Mechanics
2009-11-07 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Abstract
Pinning and depinning of wave fronts are ubiquitous features of spatially discrete systems describing a host of phenomena in physics, biology, etc. A large class of discrete systems is described by overdamped chains of nonlinear oscillators with nearest-neighbor coupling and subject to random external forces. The presence of weak randomness shrinks the pinning interval and it changes the critical exponent of the wave front depinning transition from 1/2 to 3/2. This effect is derived by means of a recent asymptotic theory of the depinning transition, extended to discrete drift-diffusion models of transport in semiconductor superlattices and confirmed by numerical calculations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0201318,
title = {Effects of disorder on the wave front depinning transition in spatially discrete systems},
author = {A. Carpio and L. L. Bonilla and A. Luzon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0201318},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, to appear as a Rapid Commun. in Phys. Rev. E