The Depinning Transition in Presence of Disorder: A Toy Model

We introduce a toy model, which represents a simplified version of the problem of the depinning transition in the limit of strong disorder. This toy model can be formulated as a simple renormalization transformation for the probability distribution of a single real variable. For this toy model, the critical line is known exactly in one particular case and it can be calculated perturbatively in the general case. One can also show that, at the transition, there is no fixed distribution accessible by renormalization which corresponds to a disordered fixed point. Instead, both our numerical and analytic approaches indicate a transition of infinite order (of the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless type). We give numerical evidence that this infinite order transition persists for the problem of the depinning transition with disorder on the hierarchical lattice.