A Deterministic-Chaos Study of Electron Triboemission Outputs

Abstract

The authors have carried out extensive measurements of electron triboemission from the scratching of ceramics and semiconductors that are briefly summarized in this paper. Analysis of the frequency-domain distribution of typical triboemission count-pulse outputs suggested that their occurrence is not Poisson’s (e.g., it is not random). This paper presents a study on the hypothesis of deterministic-chaos origin for triboemission data. Electron triboemission outputs from the ceramics alumina, sapphire, silicon nitride, and the semiconductors Si and Ge are analyzed by means of extracting deterministic-chaos metrics. The results suggest that the low-level electron-emission components may be described by multiplicative processes of random initiation, while the superimposed large burst-type components may be of deterministic origin.