Critical Activation Voltage for Phonon-Mediated Field-Driven Phenomena

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal critical activation voltage that links various field-driven phenomena to phonon interactions, unifying macroscopic and nanoscale effects across multiple crystal families.

Contribution

It reveals a universal law connecting threshold fields and phonon damping, providing a new framework for understanding field-lattice coupling in materials.

Findings

Critical activation voltage Vc is 0.1-2.7 V across phenomena.

V_c corresponds to the energy needed to couple to phonon damping peaks.

Unifies thermal instabilities with nanoscale Blech limit.

Abstract

Field-driven phenomena, from flash sintering to electromigration, exhibit threshold fields spanning six orders of magnitude. We show their product with the onset activation coherence length is a universal critical activation voltage, Vc =0.1-2.7 V. Vc represents the threshold electrical work required to resonantly couple to the universal phonon damping peak where lattice softening is maximized. This invariant unifies macroscopic thermal instabilities with the nanoscale Blech limit, establishing a universal phenomenological law for field-lattice coupling across 17 crystal families