Disorder-induced critical behavior in driven diffusive systems

Abstract

Using dynamic renormalization group we study the transport in driven diffusive systems in the presence of quenched random drift velocity with long-range correlations along the transport direction. In dimensions $d\mathopen< 4$ we find fixed points representing novel universality classes of disorder-dominated self-organized criticality, and a continuous phase transition at a critical variance of disorder. Numerical values of the scaling exponents characterizing the distributions of relaxation clusters are in good agreement with the exponents measured in natural river networks.