Random Organization and Plastic Depinning

We provide evidence that the general phenomenon of plastic depinning can be described as an absorbing phase transition, and shows the same features as the random organization which was recently studied in periodically driven particle systems [L. Corte, Nature Phys. 4, 420 (2008)]. In the plastic flow system, the pinned regime corresponds to the absorbing state and the moving state corresponds to the fluctuating state. When an external force is suddenly applied, the system eventually organizes into one of these two states with a time scale that diverges as a power law at a nonequilibrium transition. We propose a simple experiment to test for this transition in systems with random disorder.