Self-organized criticality

Concept in physics

Self-organized criticality (SOC) is a property of dynamical systems that have a critical point as an attractor. Their macroscopic behavior thus displays the spatial or temporal scale-invariance characteristic of the critical point of a phase transition, but without the need to tune control parameters to a precise value, because the system, effectively, tunes itself as it evolves towards criticality. The concept was put forward by Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld ("BTW") in a paper following an earlier paper by Jonathan I. Katz published in 1987 in Physical Review Letters, and is considered to be one of the mechanisms by which complexity arises in nature.

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