Browsing by Subject "1/f noise"

Low-frequency $1/$ noise is ubiquitous, found in all electronic devices and other diverse areas such as as music, economics and biological systems. Despite valiant efforts, the source of $1/f$ noise remains one of the oldest unsolved mysteries in modern physics after nearly 100 years since its initial discovery in 1925. In metallic conductors resistance $1/f$ noise is commonly attributed to diffusion of mobile defects that alter the scattering cross section experienced by the charge carriers. Models based on two-level tunneling systems (TLTS) are typically employed. However, a model based on the dynamics of mobile defects forming temporary clusters would naturally offer long-term correlations required by $1/f$ noise via the nearly limitless number of configurations among a group of defects. Resistance $1/f$ noise due to such motion of mobile defects was studied via Monte Carlo simulations of a simple resistor network resembling an atomic lattice. The defects migrate through the lattice via thermally activated hopping motion, causing fluctuations in the resistance due to varying scattering cross section. The power spectral density (PSD) $S(f)$ of the simulated resistance noise was then calculated and first compared to $S(f)=C/f^\alpha$ noise, where $C$ is a constant and $\alpha$ is ideally close to unity. The value of $\alpha$ was estimated via a linear fit of the noise PSD on a log-log scale. The resistor network was simulated with varying values of temperature, system size and the concentration of defects. The noise produced by the simulations did not yield pure $1/f^\alpha$ noise, instead the lowest frequencies displayed a white noise tail, changing to $1/f^\alpha$ noise between $10^{-4}$ to $10^{-2}$~Hz. In this way the spectrum of the simulated noise resembles a Lorentzian. The value of $\alpha$ was found to be the most sensitive to temperature $T$, which directly affects the motion of the defects. At high $T$ the value of $\alpha$ was closer to 1, whereas at low $T$ it was closer to $1,5$. Varying the size of the system was found to have little impact on $\alpha$ when the temperature and concentration of defects were kept fixed. Increasing the number of defects was found to have slightly more effect on $\alpha$ when the temperature and system size were kept fixed. The value of $\alpha$ was closer to unity when the concentration of defects was higher, but the effect was not nearly as pronounced compared to varying the temperature. In addition, the simulated noise was compared to a PSD of the form $S(f)\propto e^{-\sqrt{N}/T}1/f$, where $N$ is the size of the system, according to recent theoretical proceedings. The $1/f^\alpha$ part of the simulated noise was found to roughly follow the above equation, but the results remain inconclusive. Although the simple toy model did not produce pure $1/f^\alpha$ noise, the dynamics of the mobile defects do seem to have an effect on the noise PSD, yielding noise closer to $1/f$ when there are more interactions between the defects due to either higher mobility or higher concentration of defects. However, this is disregarding the white noise tail. Recent experimental research on high quality graphene employing more rigorous kinetic Monte Carlo simulations have displayed more promising results. This indicates that the dynamics of temporary cluster formation of mobile defects is relevant to understand $1/f$ noise in metallic conductors, offering an objective for future work.