Avalanches and dimensional reduction breakdown in the critical behavior of disordered systems

Theory and experiments for disordered elastic manifolds, depinning, avalanches, and sandpiles

Domain walls in magnets, vortex lattices in superconductors, contact lines at depinning, and many other systems can be modeled as an elastic system subject to quenched disorder. The ensuing field theory possesses a well-controlled perturbative expansion around its upper critical dimension. Contrary to standard field theory, the renormalization group (RG) flow involves a function, the disorder correlator Δ(w), and is therefore termed the functional RG. Δ(w) is a physical observable, the auto-correlation function of the center of mass of the elastic manifold. In this review, we give a pedagogical introduction into its phenomenology and techniques. This allows us to treat both equilibrium (statics), and depinning (dynamics). Building on these techniques, avalanche observables are accessible: distributions of size, duration, and velocity, as well as the spatial and temporal shape. Various equivalences between disordered elastic manifolds, and sandpile models exist: an elastic string driven at a point and the Oslo model; disordered elastic manifolds and Manna sandpiles; charge density waves and Abelian sandpiles or loop-erased random walks. Each of the mappings between these systems requires specific techniques, which we develop, including modeling of discrete stochastic systems via coarse-grained stochastic equations of motion, super-symmetry techniques, and cellular automata. Stronger than quadratic nearest-neighbor interactions lead to directed percolation, and non-linear surface growth with additional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) terms. On the other hand, KPZ without disorder can be mapped back to disordered elastic manifolds, either on the directed polymer for its steady state, or a single particle for its decay. Other topics covered are the relation between functional RG and replica symmetry breaking, and random-field magnets. Emphasis is given to numerical and experimental tests of the theory.

Dimensional reduction breakdown and correction to scaling in the random-field Ising model

We provide a theoretical analysis by means of the nonperturbative functional renormalization group (NP-FRG) of the corrections to scaling in the critical behavior of the random-field Ising model (RFIM) near the dimension d_{DR}≈5.1 that separates a region where the renormalized theory at the fixed point is supersymmetric and critical scaling satisfies the d→d-2 dimensional reduction property (d>d_{DR}) from a region where both supersymmetry and dimensional reduction break down at criticality (d<d_{DR}). We show that the NP-FRG results are in very good agreement with recent large-scale lattice simulations of the RFIM in d=5 and we detail the consequences for the leading correction-to-scaling exponent of the peculiar boundary-layer mechanism by which the dimensional-reduction fixed point disappears and the dimensional-reduction-broken fixed point emerges in d_{DR}.

Loop expansion around the Bethe solution for the random magnetic field Ising ferromagnets at zero temperature

We apply to the random-field Ising model at zero temperature ([Formula: see text]) the perturbative loop expansion around the Bethe solution. A comparison with the standard ϵ expansion is made, highlighting the key differences that make the expansion around the Bethe solution much more appropriate to correctly describe strongly disordered systems, especially those controlled by a [Formula: see text] renormalization group (RG) fixed point. The latter loop expansion produces an effective theory with cubic vertices. We compute the one-loop corrections due to cubic vertices, finding additional terms that are absent in the ϵ expansion. However, these additional terms are subdominant with respect to the standard, supersymmetric ones; therefore, dimensional reduction is still valid at this order of the loop expansion.