Glassy trapping of manifolds in nonpotential random flows

Abstract

We study the dynamics of polymers and elastic manifolds in non potential static random flows. We find that barriers are generated from combined effects of elasticity, disorder and thermal fluctuations. This leads to glassy trapping even in pure barrier-free divergenceless flows $v {f \to 0}{\sim} f^\phi$ ($\phi > 1$). The physics is described by a new RG fixed point at finite temperature. We compute the anomalous roughness $R \sim L^\zeta$ and dynamical $t\sim L^z$ exponents for directed and isotropic manifolds.