Scale-free behavior of displacement bursts: Lower limit and scaling exponent

State Key Laboratory for Strength and Vibration, School of Aerospace, Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an 710049, PRC

^(a) shangfl@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Received: 3 August 2012
Accepted: 17 September 2012

Abstract

Plastic flow of micro-samples proceeds in an intermittent displacement bursts, showing a scale-free power-law distribution. Using maximum likelihood estimator and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic, we investigate the statistics of displacement bursts such as lower limit and scaling exponent, for selected micro-samples from previous researches. The results of lower limit indicate that all the crystals considered share a common lower limit, the magnitude of which is found to be comparable to the largest burst size governed by short-range interactions (i.e., junctions). Additionally, the calculated results of the scaling exponents challenge those observed in many previous studies where other statistical techniques are employed. We demonstrate that our results are consistently manifested in the experimental data.