Creep and depinning in disordered media

Pascal Chauve, Thierry Giamarchi, Pierre Le Doussal

Published 2000-02-18, updated 2000-02-21Version 2

Elastic systems driven in a disordered medium exhibit a depinning transition at zero temperature and a creep regime at finite temperature and slow drive $f$. We derive functional renormalization group equations which allow to describe in details the properties of the slowly moving states in both cases. Since they hold at finite velocity $v$, they allow to remedy some shortcomings of the previous approaches to zero temperature depinning. In particular, they enable us to derive the depinning law directly from the equation of motion, with no artificial prescription or additional physical assumptions. Our approach provides a controlled framework to establish under which conditions the depinning regime is universal. It explicitly demonstrates that the random potential seen by a moving extended system evolves at large scale to a random field and yields a self-contained picture for the size of the avalanches associated with the deterministic motion. At $T>0$ we find that the effective barriers grow with lenghtscale as the energy differences between neighboring metastable states, and demonstrate the resulting activated creep law $v\sim \exp (-C f^{-\mu}/T)$ where the exponent $\mu$ is obtained in a $\epsilon=4-D$ expansion ($D$ is the internal dimension of the interface). Our approach also provides quantitatively a new scenario for creep motion as it allows to identify several intermediate lengthscales. In particular, we unveil a novel ``depinning-like'' regime at scales larger than the activation scale, with avalanches spreading from the thermal nucleus scale up to the much larger correlation length $R_{V}$. We predict that $R_{V}\sim T^{-\sigma}f^{-\lambda }$ diverges at small $f$ and $T$ with exponents $\sigma ,\lambda$ that we determine.