Interfacial depinning transitions in disordered media: revisiting an old puzzle

B. MOGLIA; EZEQUIEL V ALBANO; VILLEGAS, P; JUAN MUGLIA

JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL MECHANICS-THEORY AND EXPERIMENT

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014 vol. 1 p. 10024 - 10038

1742-5468

Interfaces advancing through random media represent a numberof different problems in physics, biology and other disciplines. Here, we studythe pinning/depinning transition of the prototypical non-equilibrium interfacialmodel, i.e. the Kardar?Parisi?Zhang equation, advancing in a disorderedmedium. We will separately analyze the cases of positive and negative nonlinearitycoefficients, which are believed to exhibit qualitatively differentbehavior: the positive case shows a continuous transition that can be related todirected-percolation-depinning, while in the negative case there is a discontinuoustransition and faceted interfaces appear. Some studies have argued from differentperspectives that both cases share the same universal behavior. By using anumber of computational and scaling techniques we will shed light on thispuzzling situation and conclude that the two cases are intrinsically different.