We find that some equilibrium systems and their non-equilibrium counterparts actually show the same jerky response or avalanche behavior on many scales in response to slowly changing external conditions. In other words, their static and dynamic avalanches behave statistically the same. This suggests that their critical properties are much more generally applicable than previously assumed. In this case, systems far from equilibrium may be used to predict equilibrium critical behavior, and vice versa.
Quantifying the universality of avalanche observables beyond critical exponents is of current great interest in theory and experiments. Here, we improve the characterization of the spatio-temporal process inside avalanches in the universality class of the depinning of elastic interfaces in random media. Surprisingly, at variance with the temporal shape, the spatial shape of avalanches has not yet been predicted. In part this is due to a lack of an analytically tractable definition: how should the shapes be centered? Here we introduce such a definition, accessible in experiments, and study the …
Many systems crackle, from earthquakes and financial market to Barkhausen effect in ferromagnetic materials. Despite the diversity in essence, the noise emitted in these dynamical systems consists of avalanche-like events with broad range of sizes and durations, characterized by power-law avalanche distributions and typical average avalanche shape that are signatures dependent on the universality class of the underlying dynamics. Here we focus on the crackling noise in ferromagnets and scrutinize the traditional statistics of Barkhausen avalanches in polycrystalline and amorphous ferromagnetic…
By means of a finite elements technique we solve numerically the dynamics of an amorphous solid under deformation in the quasistatic driving limit. We study the noise statistics of the stress-strain signal in the steady state plastic flow, focusing on systems with low internal dissipation. We analyze the distributions of avalanche sizes and durations and the density of shear transformations when varying the damping strength. In contrast to avalanches in the overdamped case, dominated by the yielding point universal exponents, inertial avalanches are controlled by a non-universal damping depend…
We investigate how the dimensionality of the embedding space affects the microscopic crackling dynamics and the macroscopic response of heterogeneous materials. Using a fiber bundle model with localized load sharing computer simulations are performed from 1 to 8 dimensions slowly increasing the external load up to failure. Analyzing the constitutive curve, fracture strength and avalanche statistics of bundles we demonstrate that a gradual crossover emerges from the universality class of localized behavior to the mean field class of fracture as the embedding dimension increases. The evolution b…
We report the measurement of multivariable scaling functions for the temporal average shape of Barkhausen noise avalanches, and show that they are consistent with the predictions of simple mean-field theories. We bypass the confounding factors of time-retarded interactions (eddy currents) by measuring thin permal- loy films, and bypass thresholding effects and amplifier distortions by applying Wiener deconvolution. We find experimental shapes that are approximately symmetric, and track the evolution of the scaling function. We solve a mean- field theory for the magnetization dynamics and calcu…
Barkhausen effect in ferromagnetic materials provides an excellent area for investigating scaling phenomena found in disordered systems exhibiting crackling noise. The critical dynamics is characterized by random pulses or avalanches with scale-invariant properties, power-law distributions, and universal features. However, the traditional Barkhausen avalanches statistics may not be sufficient to fully characterize the complex temporal correlation of the magnetic domain walls dynamics. Here we go beyond power laws and focus on the multifractal scenario to quantify the temporal scaling character…
The brain keeps its overall dynamics in a corridor of intermediate activity and it has been a long standing question what possible mechanism could achieve this task. Mechanisms from the field of statistical physics have long been suggesting that this homeostasis of brain activity could occur even without a central regulator, via self-organization on the level of neurons and their interactions, alone. Such physical mechanisms from the class of self-organized criticality exhibit characteristic dynamical signatures, similar to seismic activity related to earthquakes. Measurements of cortex rest a…
We present a numerical study on the thermal activated avalanche dynamics in granular materials composed of ferromagnetic clusters embedded in a non-magnetic matrix. A microscopic dynamical simulation based on the reaction-diffusion process is developed to modeling the magnetization process of such systems. The large-scale simulations presented here explicitly demonstrate inter-granular collective behavior induced by thermal activation of spin tunneling. In particular, we observe an intriguing criticality controlled by the rate of energy dissipation. We show that thermal activated avalanches ca…
We study universality classes and crossover behaviors in non-Abelian directed sandpile models, in terms of the metastable pattern analysis. The non-Abelian property induces spatially correlated metastable patterns, characterized by the algebraic decay of the grain density along the propagation direction of an avalanche. Crossover scaling behaviors are observed in the grain density due to the interplay between the toppling randomness and the parity of the threshold value. In the presence of such crossovers, we show that the broadness of the grain distribution plays a crucial role in resolving t…
The range of the magnitude of the liquid viscosity as a function of the temperature (T) is one of the most impressive of any physical property, changing by approximately 17 orders of magnitude from its extrapolated value at infinite temperature to that at the glass transition. We present experimental measurements of containerlessly processed metallic liquids that reveal that the ratio of the viscosity to its extrapolated infinite temperature value follows a universal function of Tcoop/T. The temperature Tcoop corresponds to the onset of cooperative motion and is strongly correlated with the gl…
Disordered systems submitted to a slowly increasing external stress often reacts with a jerky dynamics characterized by bursts of activity, called avalanches, which are the manifestation of an out-of-equilibrium phase transition. This thesis focuses on the dynamics of elastic interfaces near the depinning transition, and more specially on the effect of long-range interactions. I derive the universal scaling form of the correlation functions of the local velocity field. It allows to test the universality class of the transition as well as the range of the interactions. I also study the statisti…
This thesis presents several aspects of the physics of disordered elastic systems and of the analytical methods used for their study. On one hand we will be interested in universal properties of avalanche processes in the statics and dynamics (at the depinning transition) of elastic interfaces of arbitrary dimension in disordered media at zero temperature. To study these questions we will use the functional renormalization group. After a review of these aspects we will more particularly present the results obtained during the thesis on (i) the spatial structure of avalanches and (ii) the corre…
In the past two decades or so, we have learned how to understand crackling noise in a wide variety of systems. We review here the basic ideas and methods we use to understand crackling noise - critical phenomena, universality, the renormalization group, power laws, and universal scaling functions. These methods and tools were originally developed to understand continuous phase transitions in thermal and disordered systems, and we also introduce these more traditional applications as illustrations of the basic ideas and phenomena.
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research（复杂网络与系统研究所以）；Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering（信息学、计算与工程学院）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Bloomington, Indiana 47408, USA（印第安纳州布卢明顿市47408号）
We study the non-equilibrium behavior of the three-dimensional Gaussian random-field Ising model at T=0 in the presence of a uniform external field using a 2-spin-flip dynamics. The deterministic, history-dependent evolution of the system is compared with the one obtained with the standard 1-spin-flip dynamics used in previous studies of the model. The change in the dynamics yields a significant suppression of coercivity, but the distribution of avalanches (in number and size) stays remarkably similar, except for the largest ones that are responsible for the jump in the saturation magnetizatio…
We study the correlations between avalanches in the depinning dynamics of elastic interfaces driven on a random substrate. In the mean field theory (the Brownian force model), it is known that the avalanches are uncorrelated. Here we obtain a simple field theory which describes the first deviations from this uncorrelated behavior in a $ε=d_c-d$ expansion below the upper critical dimension $d_c$ of the model. We apply it to calculate the correlations between (i) avalanche sizes (ii) avalanche dynamics in two successive avalanches, or more generally, in two avalanches separated by a uniform disp…
Interfaces pinned by quenched disorder are often used to model jerky self-organized critical motion. We study static avalanches, or shocks, defined here as jumps between distinct global minima upon changing an external field. We show how the full statistics of these jumps is encoded in the functional-renormalization-group fixed-point functions. This allows us to obtain the size distribution P(S) of static avalanches in an expansion in the internal dimension d of the interface. Near and above d=4 this yields the mean-field distribution P(S) ~ S^(-3/2) exp(-S/[4 S_m]) where S_m is a large-scale …
We study the critical properties of the Bak-Sneppen coevolution model on scale-free networks by Monte Carlo method. We report the distribution of the avalanche size and fractal activity through the branching process. We observe that the critical fitness $f_c (N)$ depends on the number of the node such as $f_c (N) \sim 1/ \log (N)$ for both the scale-free network and the directed scale-free network. Near the critical fitness many physical quantities show power-law behaviors. The probability distribution $P(s)$ of the avalanche size at the critical fitness shows a power-law like $P(s) \sim s^{-τ…
As shown recently (arXiv:0801.3056), several types of neuronal complex networks involving non-linear integration-and-fire dynamics exhibit an abrupt activation along their transient regime. Interestingly, such an avalanche of activation has also been found to depend strongly on the topology of the networks: while the Erdős-Rény, Barabási-Albert, path-regular and path-transformed BA models exhibit well-defined avalanches; Watts-Strogatz and geographical structures present instead a gradual dispersion of activation amongst their nodes. The current work investigates such phenomena by considering …
Experimental investigations of the scaling behavior of Barkhausen avalanches in out-of-plane ferromagnetic films yield widely different results for the values of the critical exponents despite similar labyrinthine domain structures, suggesting that universality may not hold for this class of materials. Analyzing a phase field model for magnetic reversal, we show that avalanche scaling is bounded by characteristic lengthscales arising from the competition between dipolar forces and exchange interactions. We compare our results with the experiments and find a good qualitative and quantitative ag…
Cortical neural circuits display highly irregular spiking in individual neurons but variably sized collective firing, oscillations and critical avalanches at the population level, all of which have functional importance for information processing. Theoretically, the balance of excitation and inhibition inputs is thought to account for spiking irregularity and critical avalanches may originate from an underlying phase transition. However, the theoretical reconciliation of these multilevel dynamic aspects in neural circuits remains an open question. Herein, we study excitation-inhibition (E-I) b…
Multiple studies of neural avalanches across different data modalities led to the prominent hypothesis that the brain operates near a critical point. The observed exponents often indicate the mean-field directed-percolation universality class, leading to the fully-connected or random network models to study the avalanche dynamics. However, the cortical networks have distinct non-random features and spatial organization that is known to affect the critical exponents. Here we show that distinct empirical exponents arise in networks with different topology and depend on the network size. In parti…
Recently, the interest on theoretical and experimental studies of dynamic properties of the magnetic domain wall (MDW) of ferromagnetic thin films with disorder placed in an external magnetic field has increased. In order to study global and local measurable observables, we consider the $(1+1)$-dimensional model introduced by Buceta and Muraca [Physica A 390 (2011) 4192], based on rules of evolution that describe the MDW avalanches. From the values of the roughness exponents, global $ζ$, local $ζ_\text{loc}$, and spectral $ζ_s$, obtained from the global interface width, hight-difference correl…
We investigate the dynamics of the randomly pinned Fredrickson-Andersen model on the Bethe lattice. We find a line of random pinning dynamical transitions whose dynamical critical properties are in the same universality class of the $A_2$ and $A_3$ transitions of Mode Coupling Theory. The $A_3$ behavior appears at the terminal point, where the relaxation becomes logarithmic and the relaxation time diverges exponentially. We explain the critical behavior in terms of self-induced disorder and avalanches, strengthening the relationship discussed in recent works between glassy dynamics and Random …
A salient feature of cyclically driven first-order phase transformations in crystals is their scale-free avalanche dynamics. This behavior has been linked to the presence of a classical critical point but the mechanism leading to criticality without extrinsic tuning remains unexplained. Here we show that the source of scaling in such systems is an annealed disorder associated with transformation-induced slip which co-evolves with the phase transformation, thus ensuring the crossing of a critical manifold. Our conclusions are based on a model where annealed disorder emerges in the form of a ran…
We examine the many-body localization (MBL) phase transition in one-dimensional quantum systems with quenched randomness and short-range interactions. Following recent works, we use a strong-randomness renormalization group (RG) approach where the phase transition is due to the so-called avalanche instability of the MBL phase. We show that the critical behavior can be determined analytically within this RG. On a rough $\textit{qualitative}$ level the RG flow near the critical fixed point is similar to the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) flow as previously shown, but there are important differences in…
A model of an elastic manifold driven through a random medium by an applied force F is studied focussing on the effects of inertia and elastic waves, in particular {\it stress overshoots} in which motion of one segment of the manifold causes a temporary stress on its neighboring segments in addition to the static stress. Such stress overshoots decrease the critical force for depinning and make the depinning transition hysteretic. We find that the steady state velocity of the moving phase is nevertheless history independent and the critical behavior as the force is decreased is in the same univ…
We study spectral properties and the dynamics after a quench of one-dimensional spinless fermions with short-range interactions and long-range random hopping. We show that a sufficiently fast decay of the hopping term promotes localization effects at finite temperature, which prevents thermalization even if the classical motion is chaotic. For slower decays, we find that thermalization does occur. However, within this model, the latter regime falls in an unexpected universality class, namely, observables exhibit a power-law (as opposed to an exponential) approach to their thermal expectation v…
