Sweeprate and Temperature Effects on Crackling Noise

Crackling noise, defined as separate bursts characterized by power law behavior of the frequency histograms over many decades, is observed in many driven systems far from equilibrium. Examples of such systems pepper a remarkable range of length and energy scales from jerky domain wall motion of disordered magnets, to the sometimes devastating crackling of the earth to the bursty release of energy in the photosphere of the sun dwarfing that of our most horrible WMD. Typically, crackling noise is modeled in the infinitely slow driving rate limit at zero temperature. In this dissertation I investigate the effects of relaxing these limits. First I consider the crackling system at zero temperature and finite sweeprate. I discuss how the temporal overlap of power law bursts can account for a wide range of scaling behavior and provide a criterion for sweeprate controlled exponents based on exponents obtained in the infinitely slowly driven limit. I also discuss scaling arguments for hitherto unexplained results in the power spectrum of crackling response in disordered magnets, commonly referred to as Barkhausen noise. Scaling arguments and numerical results are compared to Barkhausen noise measurements in two materials representing distinct adiabatically driven universality classes.Relaxation of the zero temperature constraint cannot be done without considering finite sweeprates due to global relaxation timescales that arise at finite temperatures. We investigate the connection between sweeprate and thermal fluctuations in the far from equilibrium limit typical of crackling systems. Again, using scaling arguments and numerical simulations of the random field Ising model near a disorder-induced critical point we analyze interesting crossover phenomena in the power spectra which are also observed in Barkhausen noise but have yet to be explained.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Physics

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• White, Robert Allen

• Sweeprate; crackline; photosphere; adiabatic; superconducting; barkausen; nucleation

Statement dc:rights

• White 2001 ©

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/34853

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/34853