https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510170185
Energy landscapes, lowest gaps, and susceptibility of elastic manifolds at zero temperature
Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Physics, PO Box 1100, 02015 HUT, Finland
Corresponding author: a eira.seppala@hut.fi
Received:
December
2000
Published online: 15 June 2001
We study the effect of an external field on (1+1) and (2+1)
dimensional elastic manifolds, at zero temperature and with random
bond disorder. Due to the glassy energy landscape the configuration
of a manifold changes often in abrupt, "first order" -type of large
jumps when the field is applied. First the scaling behavior of the
energy gap between the global energy minimum and the next lowest
minimum of the manifold is considered, by employing exact ground state
calculations and an extreme statistics argument. The scaling has a
logarithmic prefactor originating from the number of the minima in the
landscape, and reads , where ζ is the roughness exponent and
θ is the energy fluctuation exponent of the manifold, L is
the linear size of the manifold, and Lz is the system height. The
gap scaling is extended to the case of a finite external field and
yields for the susceptibility of the manifolds
. We also present a mean
field argument for the finite size scaling of the first jump
field,
. The implications to wetting in random
systems, to finite-temperature behavior and the relation to
Kardar-Parisi-Zhang non-equilibrium surface growth are discussed.
PACS: 75.50.Lk – Spin glasses and other random magnets / 05.70.Np – Interface and surface thermodynamics / 68.08.Bc – Wetting / 74.60.Ge – Flux pinning, flux creep, and flux-line lattice dynamics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2001