Scaling of 1/f noise in nonequilibrium phase transitions

Abstract

Investigation of the dynamics of fluctuations of heat and mass transfer reveals that its crisis and transient modes exhibit high-energy pulsations with a power spectrum that is inversely proportional to frequency (flicker or 1/f fluctuations). Such a spectrum suggests energy transfer from high-to low-frequency modes and the possibility of large-scale catastrophic outbursts in the system being considered. The theory shows that such fluctuations arise in the system owing to the simultaneous occurrence of interacting phase transitions in the presence of white noise having a sufficiently high intensity. The distribution of fluctuations for scale transformations of the set of stochastic equations that describe the generation of 1/f noise is investigated. It is shown that, under a scale transformation, the Gaussian distribution of a random process having a 1/f spectrum passes to an exponential distribution, which is characteristic of the statistics of extreme outbursts. The probability of such outbursts must be taken into account in predicting the stability of various heat-transfer modes.