Throughout the winter, avalanche forecasters issue bulletins to help the public and the managers of public facilities make avalanche safety decisions. These bulletins typically describe important snowpack features and current weather events before rating the avalanche danger on a scale of one through five. Although the character of avalanche conditions may vary between regions, the physical pro...

We investigate the statistical properties of the Barkhausen noise in amorphous ferromagnetic films with thicknesses in the range between 100 and 1000 nm. From Barkhausen noise time series measured with the traditional inductive technique, we perform a wide statistical analysis and establish the scaling exponents τ,α,1/σνz, and ϑ. We also focus on the average shape of the avalanches, which gives...

Avalanches, or Avalanche-like, events are often observed in the dynamical behaviour of many complex systems which span from solar flaring to the Earth’s crust dynamics and from traffic flows to financial markets. Self-organized criticality (SOC) is one of the most popular theories able to explain this intermittent charge/discharge behaviour. Despite a large amount of theoretical work, empirical...

Natural disturbances have been among the most important driving factors in many ecosystems. Anthropogenic suppression of various disturbances has led to documented changes in ecosystem structure and function. Avalanche disturbances are one of the most important processes in many subalpine ecosystems world-wide and avalanche tracks provide unique habitat for various animal and plant species. Ove...

A growing body of evidence suggests that the neuronal dynamics are poised at criticality. Neuronal avalanches and long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) are hallmarks of such critical dynamics in neuronal activity and occur at fast (subsecond) and slow (seconds to hours) timescales, respectively. The critical dynamics at different timescales can be characterized by their power-law scaling exp...

The zero-temperature random-field Ising model is solved analytically for magnetization versus external field for a bilayered Bethe lattice. The mechanisms of infinite avalanches which are observed for small values of disorder are established. The effects of variable interlayer interaction strengths on infinite avalanches are investigated. The spin-field correlation length is calculated and its ...

In recent years self organised critical neuronal models have provided insights regarding the origin of the experimentally observed avalanching behaviour of neuronal systems. It has been shown that dynamical synapses, as a form of short-term plasticity, can cause critical neuronal dynamics. Whereas long-term plasticity, such as hebbian or activity dependent plasticity, have a crucial role in sha...

We use a discrete-time formulation of the asymmetric avalanche process (ASAP) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 084301 (2001)]] of p particles on a finite ring of N sites to obtain an exact expression for the average avalanche size as a function of toppling probabilities and particle density rho=p/N. By mapping the model onto driven interface problems, we find that the ASAP incorporates the annealed Kardar...

We probe the dynamics of intermittent avalanches caused by steady addition of grains to a quasi-two-dimensional heap. To characterize the time-dependent average avalanche flow speed v(t) , we image the top free surface. To characterize the grain fluctuation speed deltav(t) , we use speckle-visibility spectroscopy. During an avalanche, we find that the fluctuation speed is approximately one-tent...