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Starting from examples of experimental systems which exhibit growth and pinning I will give an introduction into the physics of elastic systems with quenched disorder in non-equilibrium situations. We review developments in the description of depinning and avalanches, as well as in the study of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class of stochastic growth. We introduce some of the analytical methods which lead to predictions testable (and sometimes tested) in experiments. Our last example is the calculation of memory effects in the KPZ class in expanding geometries which illustrates the remarkable connections between growth and disordered systems.

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Pierre Le Doussal, ENS Paris
HS III
Contact: Joachim Krug