Common Ground in Avalanche-Like Events
January 14, 2021•
Physics 14, 6
Physicists have spent decades uncovering similarities in how disordered materials deform. Now they are trying to apply these results to the design of new materials.
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Similar scaling patterns are seen in the sizes of avalanches on a snow-covered mountain and in the loudness of crackling sounds in deforming metals.
nakimori/adobe.stock.com
Similar scaling patterns are seen in the sizes of avalanches on a snow-covered mountain and in the loudness of crackling sounds in deforming metals.×
Karin Dahmen loves noise. A theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she has spent most of her career studying the “crackling noise” emitted by different materials when they deform. The noise emitted when a piece of paper is crumpled, for example, is a series of discrete snaps that vary in loudness. If you were to plot the number of snaps for each loudness value, you would find that the curve follows a “power law” relation. Dahmen and others have found this type of distribution in a wide variety of so-called disordered materials, such as crystal shards, snowbanks, and Earth’s crust. And Dahmen has developed models that can replicate this mathematical trend and explain why it arises.