The stochastic growth of metal whiskers
Soft Condensed Matter
2017-08-02 v1
Abstract
The phenomenon of spontaneously growing metal whiskers (MW) raises significant reliability concerns due to its related arcing and shorting in electric equipment. The growth kinetics of MW remains poorly predictable. Here we present a theory describing the earlier observed intermittent growth of MW as caused by local energy barriers related to variations in the random electric fields generated by surface imperfections. We find the probabilistic distribution of MW stopping times, during which MW growth halts, which is important for reliability projections.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.04270,
title = {The stochastic growth of metal whiskers},
author = {Biswas Subedi and Dipesh Niraula and Victor G. Karpov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.04270},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures