The universal high temperature regime of pinned elastic objects

TL;DR

This paper investigates the high temperature behavior of pinned elastic objects in the glass phase, demonstrating universality of scaling functions and discussing potential experimental implications.

Contribution

It introduces a continuum model with delta-correlated disorder to describe universal scaling functions at high temperatures in the glass phase.

Findings

Numerical validation on directed polymer models

Renormalization group analysis supports universality

Predicted non-monotonous temperature dependence

Abstract

We study the high temperature regime within the glass phase of an elastic object with short ranged disorder. In that regime we argue that the scaling functions of any observable are described by a continuum model with a $\delta$-correlated disorder and that they are universal up to only two parameters that can be explicitly computed. This is shown numerically on the roughness of directed polymer models and by dimensional and functional renormalization group arguments. We discuss experimental consequences such as non-monotonous behaviour with temperature.