The role of thermal coupling on avalanches in manganites

Abstract

We report here a study on the environmental dependence of the occurrence, at low temperature, of ultra-sharp field induced avalanches in phase separated manganites. Despite the high reproducibility of avalanches, it has already been observed that the critical fields shift with the magnetic field sweep rate and that different sample sizes lead to different ignition fields for the avalanches. Critical growing rates have been suggested to describe the avalanche ignition though the role of thermal coupling has hardly been considered. We qualitatively analyze here a set of experimental data on avalanches in manganites and discuss the role of thermal coupling as a key parameter of the instability in a dynamical system.