Point-occurrence self-similarity in crackling-noise systems and in other complex systems

It has been recently found that a number of systems displaying crackling noise also show a remarkable behavior as regards the temporal occurrence of successive events versus their size: a scaling law for the probability distributions of waiting times as a function of a minimum size is obeyed, signaling the existence for those systems of self-similarity in time size. This property is also present in some non-crackling systems. Here, the uncommon character of the scaling law is illustrated with simple marked renewal processes, built by definition with no correlations. Whereas processes with a finite mean waiting time do not obey a scaling law in general and tend towards a Poisson process in the limit of very high sizes, processes without a finite mean tend to another class of distributions, characterized by double-power-law waiting-time densities. This is somewhat reminiscent of the generalized central limit theorem. A model with short-range correlations is not able to escape from the attraction of those limit distributions. A discussion on open problems in the modeling of these properties is provided. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.