Avalanche transmission and critical behavior in load bearing hierarchical networks

Abstract. The strength and stability properties of hierarchical load bearing networks and their strengthened variants have been discussed in recent work. Here, we study the avalanche time distributions on these load bearing networks. The avalanche time distributions of the V− lattice, a unique realization of the networks, show power-law behavior when tested with certain fractions of its trunk weights. All other avalanche distributions show Gaussian peaked behavior. Thus the V− lattice is the critical case of the network. We discuss the implications of this result.