Zeners sound like...
…this:-
It’s the closest audio representation of the quantum avalanche effect that we could make. The sound of actual electrons bumping together. A Zener diode was sampled at 50 kSa/s using an 8 bit oscilloscope. That data was then converted to an unsigned 8 bit PCM file with no volume changes whatsoever. The only change we were forced to make was to marginally down sample to a standard 44.1 kHz when exporting the data as mp3
.
![The Zener avalanche effect as a raw sound wave with a linear scale.](../media/music.png)
Raw sound wave with a linear scale.
Notice the close similarity with the original oscilloscope trace halfway down this page. Also notice the almost (but not quite) white noise spectrogram below.
![The Zener avalanche effect as an audio spectrogram.](../media/music-spectrum.png)
Audio spectrogram.
Looking at the wider frequency domain, we find a continuous but messy mash up of frequencies out to 500 kHz as suggested below:-
![Fourier transform of a Zener avalanche signal sampled by oscilloscope.](../media/fft.png)
Fourier transform of the avalanche signal sampled by oscilloscope.
Some of the complexity of the above chart is due to the sawtooth shape of the Avalanche signal. Sawtooths have a complex Fourier transform running into even and odd harmonics ad infinitum.