title: Energy landscapes in random systems, driven interfaces, and wetting
abstract: We discuss the zero-temperature susceptibility of elastic manifolds with quenched randomness. It diverges with system size due to low-lying local minima. The distribution of energy gaps is deduced to be constant in the limit of vanishing gaps by comparing numerics with a probabilistic argument. The typical manifold response arises from a level-crossing phenomenon and implies that wetting in random systems begins with a discrete transition. The associated "jump field" scales as <h> approximately L-5/3 and L-2.2 for (1+1) and (2+1) dimensional manifolds with random bond disorder.
authors.affiliation: Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Physics, P.O. Box 1100, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland.
authors.initials: ET
authors.lastname: Seppala
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Alava