Critical nature of plastic flow

Steady plastic flows have been compared to developed turbulence because the two phenomena share the inherent complexity of
particle trajectories, the scale free spatial patterns and the power law statistics of fluctuations. The presence of power law
distributions has been interpreted as a sign of criticality, marginal stability and scale free behavior of the underlying microscopic systems. In this talk we present a simple mathematical model which is capable of generating power law signals with critical exponents matching observations. Our main conclusion is the existence of a discrete automaton behind the conventional continuum mechanical equations