Tolerance and Sensitivity in the Fuse Network

Abstract

We show that depending on the disorder, a small noise added to the threshold distribution of the fuse network may or may not completely change the subsequent breakdown process. When the threshold distribution has a lower cutoff at a finite value and a power law dependence towards large thresholds with an exponent which is less than $0.16\pm0.03$, the network is not sensitive to the added noise, otherwise it is. The transition between sensitivity or not appears to be second order, and is related to a localization-delocalization transition earlier observed in such systems.