Random Organization and Plastic Depinning

We provide evidence that plastic depinning falls into the same class of phenomena as the random organization which was recently studied in periodically driven particle systems [L. Corte et al., Nature Phys. 4, 420 (2008)]. In the plastic flow system, the pinned regime corresponds to the quiescent 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 colloidal systems and superconducting vortex systems with random disorder.