Crackling noise in paper peeling

Acoustic emission or crackling noise is measured from an experiment on splitting or peeling of paper. The energy of the events follows a power law, with an exponent β ~ 1.8 ± 0.2. The event intervals have a wide range, but superposed on scale-free statistics there is a time scale, related to the typical spatial scale of the microstructure (a bond between two fibers). Since the peeling takes place via steady-state crack propagation, correlations can be studied with ease and shown to exist in the series of acoustic events.