Avalanchelike behavior reflected in power-law statistics is a ubiquitous property of extended systems addressed in a number of generic models. The paper presents an experimental investigation of the effect of thresholding on the statistics of durations and waiting times between avalanches using acoustic emission accompanying unstable plastic deformation. It is found that durations of acoustic events obey power-law statistical distributions robust against thresholding. The quiescent time distributions follow the Poisson law for low threshold values. Both these results corroborate the hypothesis that plastic deformation is akin to the phenomena associated with self-organized criticality (SOC), often advanced on the basis of power-law amplitude statistics. Increasing the threshold height enforces deviation from the Poisson distributions toward apparent power-law behavior. Such a thresholding effect may hinder the experimental determination of SOC-like dynamics because of the inevitable noise.

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• Granular avalanches
• Plastic deformation
• Self-organized criticality
• Molecular solids