Entanglement transition of elastic lines in a strongly disordered environment

Abstract

We investigate by exact optimization the geometrical properties of three-dimensional elastic line systems with point disorder and hard-core repulsion. The line 'forests' become entangled due to increasing line wandering as the system height is increased, at fixed line density. There is a transition height at which a cluster of pairwise entangled lines spans the system, transverse to average line orientation. Numerical evidence implies that the phenomenon is in the ordinary percolation universality class.