Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Comment
  • Published:

Power laws in physics

Nature Reviews Physics volume 4, pages 501–503 (2022)Cite this article

Subjects

Getting the most from power-law-type data can be challenging. James Sethna points out some of the pitfalls in studying power laws arising from emergent scale invariance, as well as important opportunities.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Power laws and avalanche sizes in a random-field Ising model under an increasing field.

References

  1. Avnir, D., Biham, O., Lidar, D. & Malcai, O. Is the geometry of nature fractal? Science 279, 39–40 (1998).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  2. Newman, M. Power laws, pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. Contemp. Phys. 46, 323–351 (2005).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  3. Sethna, J. P., Dahmen, K. A. & Myers, C. R. Crackling noise. Nature 410, 242–250 (2001).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  4. Liarte, D. B. et al. Universal scaling for disordered viscoelastic matter I: Dynamic susceptibility at the onset of rigidity. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07474 (2021).

  5. Adam, S., Brouwer, P. W., Sethna, J. P. & Waintal, X. Enhanced mesoscopic fluctuations in the crossover between random-matrix ensembles. Phys. Rev. B 66, 165310 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Chen, Y., Papanikolaou, S., Sethna, J. P., Zapperi, S. & Durin, G. Avalanche spatial structure and multivariable scaling functions; sizes, heights, widths, and views through windows. Phys. Rev. E 84, 061103 (2011).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Chen, Y.-J., Zapperi, S. & Sethna, J. P. Crossover behavior in interface depinning. Phys. Rev. E 92, 022146 (2015).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Hayden, L. X., Raju, A. & Sethna, J. P. Unusual scaling for two-dimensional avalanches: Curing the faceting and scaling in the lower critical dimension. Phys. Rev. Res. 1, 033060 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Perkovic, O., Dahmen, K. & Sethna, J. P. Avalanches, Barkhausen noise, and plain old criticality. Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 4528–4531 (1995).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  10. Sethna, J. P. Crackling crossover. Nat. Phys. 3, 518–519 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LASSP, Physics Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    James P. Sethna

Authors
  1. James P. Sethna
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to James P. Sethna.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sethna, J.P. Power laws in physics. Nat Rev Phys 4, 501–503 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-022-00491-x

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-022-00491-x

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing