The dynamics of driven elastic media interacting with quenched disorder is important in a wide variety of physical systems which include magnetic domain wall motion, nonequilibrium growth, models of friction, vortex lattice motion in superconductors, and charge density waves. Recently an intense interest in driven elastic media with quenched disorder has been directed at dynamical ordering where at low applied drives the system is in a highly disordered pinned state and at a critical drive a depining into a highly disordered moving state occurs, while at high drives the effect of the disorder is reduced and the system can regain a considerable amount of order. Particular systems where this reordering behavior has been studied extensively experimentally, theoretically, and numerically include vortices in superconductors as well as charge-density wave systems.
Back to Home
Last Modified: 2/12/02