Why nature needs 1/f-noise

Abstract

Low-frequency 1/f-noise occurs at all levels of the nature organization and became an actual factor of nanotechnologies, but in essence it remains misunderstood by its investigators. Here, once again it is pointed out that such the state of affairs may be caused by uncritical application of probability theory notions to physical random phenomena, first of all the notion of "independence". It is shown that in the framework of statistical mechanics no medium could provide an inner wandering particle with quite certain value of diffusivity and mobility, thereby producing flicker fluctuations of these quantities. This is example of realization of universal 1/f-noise origin in many-particle systems: dependence of time progress of any particular relaxation or transport process on the whole system's detailed initial microstate.

Description of Transfer Processes in a Locally Nonequilibrium Medium

“…The transfer processes in a medium are accompanied with entropy production and the generation of flicker noise [ 5 , 6 ]. In particular, such noise is observed in the case of the flow of electric current in semiconductors [ 7 , 8 ] and in small volumes of electrolyte [ 9 , 10 , 11 ].…”