Interface Depinning in the Absence of External Driving Force

Abstract

We study the pinning-depinning phase transition of interfaces in the quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang model as the external driving force $F$ goes towards zero. For a fixed value of the driving force we induce depinning by increasing the nonlinear term coefficient $\lambda$, which is related to lateral growth, up to a critical threshold. We focus on the case in which there is no external force applied (F=0) and find that, contrary to a simple scaling prediction, there is a finite value of $\lambda$ that makes the interface to become depinned. The critical exponents at the transition are consistent with directed percolation depinning. Our results are relevant for paper wetting experiments, in which an interface gets moving with no external driving force.

4 pages, 3 figures included, uses epsf. Submitted to PRL

References in corpus (1)

• Comment on: `Pipe Network Model for Scaling of Dynamic Interfaces in Porous Media'

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Variational Formulation for the KPZ and Related Kinetic Equations
• Interfacial depinning transitions in disordered media: revisiting an old puzzle
• Pinning-depinning transitions in two classes of discrete elastic-string models in (2+1)-dimensions
• Exponents and front fluctuations in the quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class of one- and two- dimensional interfaces