Eur. Phys. J. E (2011) 34: 117
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2011-11117-5

Regular Article

Characterizing plastic depinning dynamics with the fluctuation theorem

¹ Department of Physics, Princeton University, 08544, Princeton, NJ, USA
² Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 87545, Los Alamos, NM, USA

^* e-mail: cjrx@lanl.gov

Received: 8 February 2011
Revised: 14 June 2011
Accepted: 9 September 2011
Published online: 28 October 2011

Abstract

We demonstrate that the fluctuation theorem can be used to characterize plastic flow phases in collectively interacting particle assemblies driven over quenched disorder when strong fluctuations and crackling noise with 1/f ^α character occur. By measuring the frequency of entropy-destroying trajectories and the diffusivity near the threshold for motion, we map out the different dynamic phases and demonstrate that the fluctuation theorem holds in the strongly fluctuating plastic flow regime which was previously shown to be chaotic. For different driving rates and disorder strength, we find that it is possible to define an effective temperature which decreases with increasing drive, as expected for this type of system. When the size of the pinning sites is large, we identify specific regimes where the fluctuation theorem holds only at long times due to an excess of negative entropy events that occur when particles undergo circular motions within the traps. We discuss how the fluctuation theorem could be applied to plastic flow in other driven nonthermal systems with quenched disorder such as superconducting vortices, magnetic domain walls, Coulomb glasses, and earthquake models.