Energy landscapes in random systems, driven interfaces and wetting

Abstract

We discuss the zero-temperature susceptibility of elastic manifolds with quenched randomness. It diverges with system size due to low-lying local minima. The distribution of energy gaps is deduced to be constant in the limit of vanishing gaps by comparing numerics with a probabilistic argument. The typical manifold response arises from a level-crossing phenomenon and implies that wetting in random systems begins with a discrete transition. The associated ``jump field'' scales as $<h > \sim L^{-5/3}$ and $L^{-2.2}$ for (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional manifolds with random bond disorder.