Glassy dynamics of driven elastic manifolds

✍ Scribed by Valerii M. Vinokur

• Book ID: 104297284
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 646 KB
• Volume: 107
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-2789
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-2789(97)00109-7

✦ Synopsis

We study the low-temperature dynamics of an elastic manifold driven through a random medium. For driving forces well below the zero-temperature depinning force, the manifold advances via thermally activated hops over the energy barriers separating favorable metastable states. We develop a scaling theory of the thermally activated dynamics (creep) and find a nonlinear glassy response for the driven manifold, v ~ exp(-const x F-U). We consider an exactly solvable one-dimensional model for random driven dynamics which exhibits a creep-like velocity-force characteristic. We discuss a microscopic mechanism for the creep motion and show that the distribution of waiting times for the hopping processes scales as a power-law. This power-law distribution naturally yields an exponential response for the creep of the manifold.