A definition

> Cavitation occurs when the hydrodynamic pressure exceeds the vapour pressure of a moving liquid. Gas bubbles form within the liquid, which thus becomes a two-phase system. These bubbles will be crushed against the metal surface at high speed, an attack that leads to cavities with rounded contours.

The reason for cavitation is usually because of turbulence. As an object moves through water it causes disturbances; if they are slow enough and viscous enough the local pressure differences are predictable and smooth. Whereas if you have mixing or an open system (ie not bounded by a pipe) with not very viscous liquid or very fast flow, you cause vortices and chaotic patterns, which cause local pressure differences and cavitation. It's sort of the difference between having smooth flow, where on a normal distribution, everything is pretty close to a certain pressure, and having chaotic flow, where the distribution of pressures is wider and some proportion of those pressure differences fall under the vapor pressure of the liquid.

Cavitation is interesting because of the mechanical properties of water which cause damage to systems. For electromagnetism you would need something similar, so ask questions like

1. Are there any EM systems known for chaotic behavior?
2. Do these chaotic EM systems cause damage to other systems?
3. Bonus, are there any other EM systems that are known to cause damage?

For 1 and 2, yes, my understanding is that this is one of the major issues with plasma containment in fusion reactors (ie, ITER). In this case it may not be the EM itself that causes the issue, but the loss of beam confinement.

> Again, the nonlinear equations describing the motion of the plasma particles can exhibit chaotic behavior that allows the particles to escape from the confining fields. For example, electrons circulating along the guiding magnetic field lines in a toroidal confinement device called a TOKAMAK will feel a periodic perturbation because of slight variations in magnetic fields, which can be described by a model similar to the standard map. When this perturbation is sufficiently large, electron orbits can become chaotic, which leads to an anomalous loss of plasma confinement that poses a serious impediment to the successful design of a fusion reactor. source

Which brings me to 3) - it's far more common in electronics design to have to worry about inductive spikes, where semiconductors have to take PARTICULAR care against spikes exceeding a certain value. While this isn't chaotic, it is most similar to cavitation because a periodic spike, however rare, if it hits a semiconductor, it can damage the semiconductor over time. This can also cause EM - which is not chaotic, it's predictable, but because it's from so many traces it's likely to cause an exception in testing if you don't do clever things to spread the affected frequencies out. Too many switching supplies at exactly 1MHz for example will probably fail your test - it's a stochastic measure to spread that out over different frequencies and get better EMI results.

Ayway hope that answers some of the question.

Edit: citation