Self-organized criticality

Summary

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 published in 1987 in Physical Review Letters, and is considered to be one of the mechanisms by which complexity arises in nature. Its concepts have been applied across fields as diverse as geophysics, physical cosmology, evolutionary biology and ecology, bio-inspired computing and optimization (mathematics), economics, quantum gravity, sociology, solar physics, plasma physics, neurobiology and others. SOC is typically observed in slowly driven non-equilibrium systems with many degrees of freedom

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality

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Direct-write laser-induced self-organization and metallization beyond the focal volume in tellurite glass

Yves Bellouard, Gözden Torun

We report on a self-organized process initiated on a potassium-tungsten-tellurite glass surface under repetitive femtosecond laser irradiation in a regime where cumulative effects lead to a localized melting. Specifically, we show that self-organized periodic patterns consisting of parallel nanoplanes perpendicular to the laser polarization are forming and extending beyond the zone under direct laser exposure. Examination of the modified regions revealed a phase change from a glassy tellurium-oxide to a crystalline tellurium. In addition, we observe that this self-organization process, associated with elemental redistribution and deoxygenation, is triggered by the optical-field strength. We suggest that early self-organized nanostructures formed by a local-field enhancement is subsequently reinforced by a metallization event in an open-air atmosphere.

2021

Ultrafast Laser Direct-Writing of Self-Organized Microstructures in Ge-Sb-S Chalcogenide Glass

Yves Bellouard, Gözden Torun

The structuring of mid-IR materials, such as chalcogenide glass (ChG), at the micro and nano scales, is of high interest for the fabrication of photonic devices in general, and for spectroscopy applications in particular. One efficient method for producing regular patterns with a sub-micron to micron length scale is through self-organization processes occurring during femtosecond laser exposure. These processes occur in a broad set of materials, where such self-organized patterns can be found not only on the surface but also within the material volume. This study specifically investigates the case of chalcogenide glass (Ge23Sb7S70) exposed to femtosecond laser pulses, inducing pulse-to-pulse nanostructure formation that is correlated to the glass network structural evolution using Raman spectroscopy as well as morphological and elemental microscopy analysis.

2022

We reinvestigate the Deterministic Lattice Gas introduced as a paradigmatic model of the 1/f spectra arising according to the self-organized criticality scenario. We demonstrate that the density fluctuations exhibit an unexpected dependence on systems size and relate the finding to effective Langevin equations. The low-density behavior is controlled by the critical properties of the gas at the absorbing state phase transition. We also show that the deterministic lattice gas is in the Manna universality class of absorbing state phase transitions. This is in contrast to expectations in the literature that suggested that the entirely deterministic nature of the dynamics would put the model in a different universality class. To our knowledge this is the first fully deterministic member of the Manna universality class. © 2012 American Physical Society.

2012