From Individual to Collective Pinning: Effect of Long-range Elastic Interactions

Abstract

We study the effect of long-range elastic interactions in the dynamical behavior of an elastic chain driven quasi-statically in a quenched random pinning potential and in the strong pinning limit. This is a generic situation occuring in solid friction, crack propagation, wetting front motion, ... Tuning the exponent of the algebraic decay of the elastic interaction with the distance is shown to give rise to three regimes: a Mean-Field (MF) regime, a Laplacian (L) regime and an intermediate regime where the critical exponents interpolate continuously between the MF and L limit cases. The effect of the driving mode on the avalanche statistics is also analyzed.