title: Effects of disorder on the wave front depinning transition in spatially discrete systems.
abstract: Pinning and depinning of wave fronts are ubiquitous features of spatially discrete systems describing a host of phenomena in physics, biology, etc. A large class of discrete systems is described by overdamped chains of nonlinear oscillators with nearest-neighbor coupling and subject to random external forces. The presence of weak randomness shrinks the pinning interval and it changes the critical exponent of the wave front depinning transition from 1/2 to 3/2. This effect is derived by means of a recent asymptotic theory of the depinning transition, extended to discrete drift-diffusion models of transport in semiconductor superlattices and is confirmed by numerical calculations.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Matemática Aplicada, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Carpio
authors.forename: L L
authors.initials: LL
authors.lastname: Bonilla
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Luzón