Gauge glass in two dimensions

The gauge glass model offers an interesting example of a randomly frustrated system with a continuous O(2) symmetry. In two dimensions, the existence of a glass phase at low temperatures has long been disputed among numerical studies. To resolve this controversy, we examine the behavior of vortices whose movement generates phase slips that destroy phase rigidity at large distances. Detailed analytical and numerical studies of the corresponding Coulomb gas problem in a random potential establish that the ground state, with a finite density of vortices, is polarizable with a scale-dependent dielectric susceptibility. Screening by vortex/antivortex pairs of arbitrarily large size is present to eliminate the logarithmic divergence of the Coulomb energy of a single vortex. The observed power-law decay of the Coulomb interaction between vortices with distance in the ground state leads to a power-law divergence of the glass correlation length with temperature $T$. It is argued that free vortices possess a bound excitation energy and a nonzero diffusion constant at any $T>0$.Comment: 10 pages, no figure, to appear in Proceedings of YKIS 2009 Workshop: Frontiers of Nonequilibrium Physic

Rare-event induced binding transition of heteropolymers

Sequence heterogeneity broadens the binding transition of a polymer onto a linear or planar substrate. This effect is analyzed in a real-space renormalization group scheme designed to capture the statistics of rare events. In the strongly disordered regime, binding initiates at an exponentially rare set of ``good contacts''. Renormalization of the contact potential yields a Kosterlitz-Thouless type transition in any dimension. This and other predictions are confirmed by extensive numerical simulations of a directed polymer interacting with a columnar defect.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure