DRIVEN INTERFACES WITH PHASE DISORDER

A variety of systems including charge density waves, flux line arrays, and surfaces of disordered crystals can be described by the driven, phase-disordered sine-Gordon equation. Here it is shown that the dominant effect of the phase disorder in the uniformly driven state is to introduce a quenched random mobility for the moving ''interface'' or ''phase'' variable. Analytic predictions are obtained by mapping the resulting disordered Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation to a directed polymer problem, and the predictions are compared to simulations of one-dimensional phase-disordered solid-on-solid models.