Disordering Transitions and Peak Effect in Polydisperse Particle Systems

We show numerically that in a binary system of Yukawa particles, a dispersity driven disordering transition occurs. In the presence of quenched disorder this disordering transition coincides with a marked increase in the depinning threshold, known as a peak effect. We find that the addition of poorly pinned particles can increase the overall pinning in the sample by increasing the amount of topological disorder present. If the quenched disorder is strong enough to create a significant amount of topological disorder in the monodisperse system, addition of a poorly pinned species generates further disorder but does not produce a peak in the depinning force. Our results indicate that for binary mixtures, optimal pinning occurs for topological defect fraction densities of 0.2 to 0.25. For defect densities below this range, the system retains orientational order. We determine the effect of the pinning density, strength, and radius on the depinning peak and find that the peak effect is more pronounced in weakly pinning systems.Comment: 8 pages, 8 postscript figures. Version to appear in PR

Crossover from Intermittent to Continuum Dynamics for Locally Driven Colloids

We simulate a colloid with charge q_d driven through a disordered assembly of interacting colloids with charge q and show that, for q_d \approx q, the velocity-force relation is nonlinear and the velocity fluctuations of the driven particle are highly intermittent with a 1/f characteristic. When q_d >> q, the average velocity ddrops, the velocity force relation becomes linear, and the velocity fluctuations are Gaussian. We discuss the results in terms of a crossover from strongly intermittent heterogeneous dynamics to continuum dynamics. We also make several predictions for the transient response in the different regimes.Comment: 4 pages, 5 postscript figures. Version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Shear Banding and Spatiotemporal Oscillations in Vortex Matter in Nanostructured Superconductors

We propose a simple nanostructured pinning array geometry where a rich variety of complex vortex shear banding phenomena can be realized. A single row of pinning sites is removed from a square pinning array. Shear banding effects arise when vortex motion in the pin-free channel nucleates motion of vortices in the surrounding pinned regions, creating discrete steps in the vortex velocity profile away from the channel. Near the global depinning transition, the width of the band of moving vortices undergoes oscillations or fluctuations that can span the entire system. We use simulations to show that these effects should be observable in the transport properties of the system. Similar large oscillations and shear banding effects are known to occur for sheared complex fluids in which different dynamical phases coexist.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figure

Noise at the Wigner Glass Transition

Using a simple model for interacting electrons in two dimensions with random disorder, we show that a crossover from a Wigner liquid to a Wigner glass occurs as a function of charge density. The noise power increases strongly at the transition and the characteristics of the 1/f^alpha noise change. When the temperature is increased, the noise power decreases. We compare these results with recent noise measurements in systems with two-dimensional metal-insulator transitions.Comment: 4 pages, 5 postscript figure

Simulations of Noise in Disordered Systems

We use particle dynamics simulations to probe the correlations between noise and dynamics in a variety of disordered systems, including superconducting vortices, 2D electron liquid crystals, colloids, domain walls, and granular media. The noise measurements offer an experimentally accessible link to the microscopic dynamics, such as plastic versus elastic flow during transport, and can provide a signature of dynamical reordering transitions in the system. We consider broad and narrow band noise in transport systems, as well as the fluctuations of dislocation density in a system near the melting transition.Comment: 12 pages, 9 postscript figures, requires spie.cls. SPIE Conference on Fluctuations and Noise 2003, invited contributio

Active Microrheology in Active Matter Systems: Mobility, Intermittency and Avalanches

We examine the mobility and velocity fluctuations of a driven particle moving through an active matter bath of self-mobile disks for varied density or area coverage and varied activity. We show that the driven particle mobility can exhibit non-monotonic behavior that is correlated with distinct changes in the spatial-temporal structures that arise in the active media. We demonstrate that the probe particle velocity distributions exhibit specific features in the different dynamic regimes, and identify an activity-induced uniform crystallization that occurs for moderate activity levels and that is distinct from the previously observed higher activity cluster phase. The velocity distribution in the cluster phase has telegraph noise characteristics produced when the probe particle moves alternately through high mobility areas that are in the gas state and low mobility areas that are in the dense phase. For higher densities and large activities, the system enters what we characterize as an active jamming regime. Here the probe particle moves in intermittent jumps or avalanches which how power-law distributed sizes that are similar to the avalanche distributions observed for non-active disk systems near the jamming transition.Comment: 8 pages, 8 postscript figure

Random Organization and Plastic Depinning

We provide evidence that plastic depinning falls into the same class of phenomena as the random organization which was recently studied in periodically driven particle systems [L. Corte et al., Nature Phys. 4, 420 (2008)]. In the plastic flow system, the pinned regime corresponds to the quiescent state and the moving state corresponds to the fluctuating state. When an external force is suddenly applied, the system eventually organizes into one of these two states with a time scale that diverges as a power law at a nonequilibrium transition. We propose a simple experiment to test for this transition in colloidal systems and superconducting vortex systems with random disorder.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figures; version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let