One-Way Hysteresis in the Depinning Transition

TL;DR

This paper predicts and analyzes a generic one-way hysteresis mechanism in depinning transitions, showing it can occur without changing the continuous nature of the phase transition, with implications for experiments and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a universal mechanism for one-way hysteresis in depinning models and provides a method to calculate the hysteresis gap exactly.

Findings

Hysteresis is generic in stress-overshoot depinning models

The hysteresis gap can be calculated exactly in many models

The phase transition remains continuous despite hysteresis

Abstract

We identify a mechanism for a type of hysteresis which we predict to occur in a variety of depinning transitions. We show that the phenomenon of one-way hysteresis is generic to stress-overshoot models of the depinning transition, and we show how to calculate the size of the hysteresis gap exactly in a large class of models. Unlike thermodynamic phase transitions, the dynamic phase transition is still {\em continuous} despite the presence of hysteresis because the terms which produce the hysteresis are renormalization group irrelevant. We discuss the experimental and numerical signatures of one-way hysteresis, which includes microscopic nucleation.