Crackling Noise

Abstract

Abstract Crackling noise refers to an intermittent series of pulses of broadly distributed amplitude and duration that is observed in different contexts from the crumpling of a sheet of paper to the flow of fluids in porous media. Studying crackling noise is interesting because it reflects key microscopic processes inside the material, with each crackle in the noise corresponding to an internal avalanche event. A distinct statistical feature of crackling noise is the presence of power law distributed noise pulses and long-range correlations which are the hallmarks of critical phenomena. Hence, the physics of complex non-equilibrium disordered systems provides the natural theoretical framework to tackle crackling noise. The present book reviews the statistical properties of crackling noise, providing an introduction to the main theoretical concepts needed to interpret them. The book also contains a detailed discussion of several examples of crackling noise in materials, including fracture, plasticity, ferromagnetism, superconductivity, granular flow and fluid flow in porous media. A final chapter discusses the relevance of avalanche behavior for biological systems.