Driven depinning of strongly disordered media and anisotropic mean-field limits

TL;DR

This paper investigates the depinning transition in strongly disordered media using a generic elastic channel model with transverse couplings, revealing a tricritical point separating continuous and hysteretic depinning regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a generic model of driven disordered systems with elastic and viscous couplings, analyzing its mean-field limits and identifying a tricritical point in the depinning transition.

Findings

Existence of a tricritical point in the mean-field limit.

Distinct regimes of continuous and hysteretic depinning.

Many collective transport models are special cases of this generic model.

Abstract

Extended systems driven through strong disorder are modeled generically using coarse-grained degrees of freedom that interact elastically in the directions parallel to the driving force and that slip along at least one of the directions transverse to the motion. A realization of such a model is a collection of elastic channels with transverse viscous couplings. In the infinite range limit this model has a tricritical point separating a region where the depinning is continuous, in the universality class of elastic depinning, from a region where depinning is hysteretic. Many of the collective transport models discussed in the literature are special cases of the generic model.