Aspects of dielectric breakdown in a model for disordered non-linear composites

We study dielectric breakdown in a semi-classical bond percolation model for non-linear composite materials introduced by us and the relaterd breakdown exponent near the percolation thresh-old in two dimensions. The breakdown exponent after doing finite size scaling analysis is found to be tB ≈ 1.42. We discuss in detail the differences in our model from the traditional models for dielectric breakdown and argue that our result seems to be different from the standard result of 43 obtained in the previous models.