Crackling Noise and Avalanches: Scaling, Critical Phenomena, and the Renormalization Group

TL;DR

This paper reviews the understanding of crackling noise and avalanches through critical phenomena, universality, and the renormalization group, highlighting their applications in phase transitions and disordered systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of methods like the renormalization group and scaling functions applied to crackling noise and avalanches, connecting them to phase transition theory.

Findings

Crackling noise exhibits universal scaling laws.

Renormalization group methods elucidate critical behavior.

Universal functions describe diverse systems' avalanches.

Abstract

In the past two decades or so, we have learned how to understand crackling noise in a wide variety of systems. We review here the basic ideas and methods we use to understand crackling noise - critical phenomena, universality, the renormalization group, power laws, and universal scaling functions. These methods and tools were originally developed to understand continuous phase transitions in thermal and disordered systems, and we also introduce these more traditional applications as illustrations of the basic ideas and phenomena.