Scaling Behavior of Driven Interfaces Above the Depinning Transition

Abstract

We study the depinning transition for models representative of each of the two universality classes of interface roughening with quenched disorder. For one of the universality classes, the roughness exponent changes value at the transition, while the dynamical exponent remains unchanged. We also find that the prefactor of the width scales with the driving force. We propose several scaling relations connecting the values of the exponents on both sides of the transition, and discuss some experimental results in light of these findings.

Revtex 3.0, 4 pages in PRL format + 5 figures (available at ftp://jhilad.bu.edu/pub/abbhhss/ma-figures.tar.Z ) submitted to Phys Rev Lett