DETERMINISM AND CORRELATION DIMENSION OF BARKHAUSEN NOISE

Barkhausen noise (BN) is measured in an amorphous ribbon in an open magnetic circuit. The experiment is set up in such a way as to obtain the BN signal with a high frequency range and low apparatus noise. The driving field is produced by a pair of Helmholtz coils and the pick-up coil is a low capacity radio coil. The signal is amplified by a custom designed two-stage, battery operated amplifier, which together with the coils and the ferromagnetic ribbon is screened by three coats of soft iron. The data acquisition is done by a 12-bit analog-digital card allowing one to obtain up to $1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{6}$ data points with a sampling frequency up to 1 MHz. The correlation dimension of the BN signal is calculated using the Grassberger-Procaccia algorithm and the surrogate data method is used to exclude artifacts. The choice of the measurement conditions and the calculation parameters is discussed. The results show a low dimensionality of the Barkhausen noise that leads to the conclusion that the effect may contain or is caused by a deterministic mechanism. The experimental method allows one to obtain the BN signal over many magnetic reversals so that the repeatability of the results is shown and statistics on the correlation dimension values are performed.