Figure 4 - uploaded by Giulia Giordano
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The lightning transient phases, from left to right: several branches are initially generated by the stepped leader; the stepped leader meets a connecting leader and the cloud is connected with the ground; only the main branch persists, corresponding to the optimal path (w.r.t. J path h
Source publication
A well-known property of linear resistive electrical networks is that the current distribution minimizes the total dissipated energy. When the circuit includes resistors with nonlinear monotonic characteristic, the current distribution minimizes in general a different functional. We show that, if the nonlinear characteristic is a threshold-like fun...
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Context 1
... one of these branches -corresponding to the minimum-threshold path -first connects to the ground (in general with the aid of a connecting leader), all the others branches are depleted, as shown in Fig. 4, obtained through simulations that faithfully reproduce this ...
Context 2
... all our numerical experiments, the capacitances have been taken all equal. We have set C k = 1 for all k, without restriction, since changing the capacitance value is equivalent to scaling time, hence the steady-state value is unaffected. Fig. 4 reports four instants of the simulation with δ = 0.7 (see Supplementary Material, Movie S5). It can be seen that, for larger variability of the dielectric rigidity, i.e. larger δ, the initial branching activity is more ...
