Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 8: Statistical Physics far from Thermal Equilibrium
DY 8.16: Talk
Monday, March 20, 2017, 19:00–19:15, ZEU 118
Depinning as a coagulation process — •Muhittin Mungan1, Melih Iseri1, and David Kaspar2 — 1Department of Physics,, Bogazici University, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey — 2Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA
We consider a one-dimensional sandpile model which mimics an elastic string of particles driven through a strongly pinning periodic environment with phase disorder.
The evolution towards depinning occurs by the triggering of avalanches in regions of activity which are at first isolated but later grow and merge. For large system sizes the dynamically critical behavior is dominated by the coagulation of these active regions. The analysis and numerical simulations show that the evolution of the sizes of active regions is well-described by a Smoluchowski coagulation equation, allowing us to predict correlation lengths and avalanche sizes. Moreover, the coagulation process emerges as the macroscopic description of the evolution to depinning.
As our analysis shows, this connection is robust, i.e. it depends little on the details of the underlying microscopic model, providing an example for the emergence of universal features in disordered systems far from equilibrium.