Random Organization and Plastic Depinning

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that plastic depinning phenomena are analogous to random organization, showing a nonequilibrium transition characterized by diverging time scales, with implications for colloidal and vortex systems.

Contribution

It establishes a connection between plastic depinning and random organization, proposing a universal framework for understanding nonequilibrium transitions in driven disordered systems.

Findings

Plastic depinning exhibits a phase transition similar to random organization.

The transition involves a diverging time scale at the critical point.

Experimental setups are proposed for colloidal and vortex systems.

Abstract

We provide evidence that plastic depinning falls into the same class of phenomena as the random organization which was recently studied in periodically driven particle systems [L. Corte et al., Nature Phys. 4, 420 (2008)]. In the plastic flow system, the pinned regime corresponds to the quiescent state and the moving state corresponds to the fluctuating state. When an external force is suddenly applied, the system eventually organizes into one of these two states with a time scale that diverges as a power law at a nonequilibrium transition. We propose a simple experiment to test for this transition in colloidal systems and superconducting vortex systems with random disorder.