The Pinning Paths of an Elastic Interface

Abstract

We introduce a model describing the paths that pin an elastic interface moving in a disordered medium. We find that the scaling properties of these ``elastic pinning paths'' (EPP) are different from paths embedded on a directed percolation cluster, which are known to pin the interface of the ``directed percolation depinning'' class of surface growth models. The EPP are characterized by a roughness exponent $α=1.25$, intermediate between that of the free inertial process ($α=3/2$) and the diode-resistor problem on a Cayley tree ($α=1$). We also calculate numerically the mean cluster size and the cluster size distribution for the EPP.