The applications of superconducting magnesium diboride are substantially limited by the presence of magnetic flux avalanches at low temperatures. Here, quickly moving magnetic vortices create large amounts of heat and magnetic noise. Such avalanches can be suppressed by evaporating metal layers to the surface of the superconductor, which acts both as a heat sink and as an electromagnetic drag b...

We show for the Ising model that it is possible to construct a discrete time stochastic model analogous to the Langevin equation that incorporates an arbitrary amount of damping. It is shown to give the correct equilibrium statistics and is then used to investigate nonequilibrium phenomena, in particular, magnetic avalanches. The value of damping can greatly alter the shape of hysteresis loops,...

Scale-free fluctuations are ubiquitous in behavioral performance and neuronal activity. In time scales from seconds to hundreds of seconds, psychophysical dynamics and the amplitude fluctuations of neuronal oscillations are governed by power-law-form long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs). In millisecond time scales, neuronal activity comprises cascade-like neuronal avalanches that exhibit po...

We discuss intermittent time series consisting of discrete bursts or avalanches separated by waiting or silent times. The short time correlations can be understood to follow from the properties of individual avalanches, while longer time correlations often present in such signals reflect correlations between triggerings of different avalanches. As one possible source of the latter kind of corre...

A major goal of neuroscience is to elucidate mechanisms of cortical information processing and storage. Previous work from our laboratory (Beggs and Plenz, 2003) revealed that propagation of local field potentials (LFPs) in cortical circuits could be described by the same equations that govern avalanches. Whereas modeling studies suggested that these "neuronal avalanches" were optimal for infor...

Due to the occurence of punctuations or avalanches, flux penetration in superconductors is not the smooth process that is described in many textbooks. We investigate the relationship between spatial fluctuations of the vortex density map and vortex avalanches. For the experiment, we use a magneto-optical image lock-in amplifier. The optimization of this apparatus, in particular with respect to ...

Since the times of the founders of streamer theory — Raether [1], Loeb [2] and Meek [3] — a special attention has been paid to high populated electron avalanches possessing potential to overgrowing into streamers. One of the basic problem that has not been resolved so far concerns anomalous statistical behavior of big avalanches with electron populations n > 10. The mentioned anomaly consists i...

Avalanches represent a very short, local, dynamic event in snow-covered mountainous regions. They are not easy to predict and often can produce devastating results. Avalanche cartography deals with the causes and consequences of such incidents and attempts to depict them in a variety of ways. The most common cartographic representation within this field is the avalanche hazard map. It incorpora...

Rock–ice avalanches have increased in recent years due to global warming. On 12 March 2004, a massive failure of rock mass ( 9.1×106 m3</mml:mat...

This is a review article of our work on hysteresis, avalanches, and criticality. We provide an extensive introduction to scaling and renormalization–group ideas, and discuss analytical and numerical results for size distributions, correlation functions, magnetization, avalanche durations and average avalanche shapes, and power spectra. We focus here on applications to magnetic Barkhausen noise,...