Large-scale numerical simulations of ultrametric long-range depinning

The depinning of an elastic line interacting with a quenched disorder is studied for long-range interactions, applicable to in-plane crack propagation or wetting. An ultrametric distance is introduced instead of the Euclidean distance, allowing for a drastic reduction of the numerical complexity of the problem. Based on large-scale simulations, two to three orders of magnitude larger than previously considered, we obtain a very precise determination of critical exponents which are shown to be indistinguishable from their Euclidean metric counterparts. Moreover, the scaling functions are shown to be unchanged. The choice of an ultrametric distance thus does not affect the universality class of the depinning transition and opens the way to an analytic real-space renormalization-group approach.