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 4/3 obtained in the previous models.