Avalanches and Non-Gaussian Fluctuations of the Global Velocity of Imbibition Fronts

We present an experimental study of the global velocity V(t) of a viscous fluid interface during forced-flow imbibition in a disordered medium. Our high resolution setup shows that the fronts display an intermittent behavior signature of a burstlike dynamics, with power-law distributed avalanches. When measured at scales comparable to the correlation length, velocity fluctuations follow an asymmetric non-Gaussian distribution, whose skewness increases with decreasing measuring window and/or injection flow rate, offering the effective number of degrees of freedom probed in our experiment.