Size distributions of shocks and static avalanches from the Functional Renormalization Group
Pierre Le Doussal, Kay Jörg Wiese
CNRS-Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de
l'Ecole Normale Supérieure,
24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France
Abstract
Interfaces pinned by quenched disorder are often used to model jerky
self-organized critical motion. We study static avalanches, or shocks,
defined here as jumps between distinct global minima upon changing an
external field. We show how the full statistics of these jumps is
encoded in the functional-renormalization-group fixed-point
functions. This allows us to obtain the size distribution P(S)
of static avalanches in an expansion in the internal dimension d
of the interface. Near and above d = 4 this yields the mean-field distribution P(S) ∼ S-3/2exp(-S/4Sm) where Sm is a large-scale cutoff, in some cases calculable. Resumming all 1-loop contributions, we find
P(S) ∼ S-τ
exp(C(S/Sm)1/2 -B
(S/Sm)δ), where B,
C, δ and τ are obtained to first order in ε = 4 -
d. Our result is consistent to O(ε) with the
relation τ = τζ := 2 - 2/(d + ζ),
where ζ is the static roughness exponent, often conjectured to
hold at depinning. Our calculation applies to all static universality
classes, including random-bond, random-field and random-periodic
disorder. Extended to long-range elastic systems, it yields a
different size distribution for the case of contact-line elasticity,
with an exponent compatible with τ = 2 - 1/(d + ζ) to
O(ε = 2 - d). We discuss consequences for
avalanches at depinning and for sandpile models, relations to Burgers
turbulence and the possibility that the relation τ = τζ be violated to higher loop order.
Finally, we show that the avalanche-size distribution on a hyper-plane
of co-dimension one is in mean-field (valid close to and above
d = 4) given by P(S) ∼
K1/3(S)/S, where K is the
Bessel-K function, thus τhyper plane = 4/3.
arXiv:0812.1893 [pdf]
Phys. Rev. E 79, 051106 (2009) [pdf]
[MR report]
Copyright (C) by Kay Wiese. Last edited June 9, 2020.