# 25 Years of Self-organized Criticality: Concepts and Controversies

@article{Watkins201525YO,
title={25 Years of Self-organized Criticality: Concepts and Controversies},
author={Nicholas Wynn Watkins and Gunnar Pruessner and Sandra C. Chapman and Norma Bock Crosby and Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen},
journal={Space Science Reviews},
year={2015},
volume={198},
pages={3-44}
}
• Published 20 April 2015
• Physics
• Space Science Reviews
Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory in the last few decades, and has played a significant role in the development of complexity science. SOC, and more generally fractals and power laws, have attracted much comment, ranging from the very positive to the polemical. The other papers (Aschwanden et al. in Space Sci. Rev., 2014, this issue…
102 Citations
25 Years of Self-organized Criticality: Space and Laboratory Plasmas
• Physics
• 2016
Studies of complexity in extended dissipative dynamical systems, in nature and in laboratory, require multiple approaches and the framework of self-organized criticality (SOC) has been used
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Nature
• 2020
A driven–dissipative gas of ultracold potassium atoms is used to demonstrate three key signatures of self-organized criticality, and a system in which the phenomenon can be experimentally tested is provided.
25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics
• Physics
• 2016
Shortly after the seminal paper “Self-Organized Criticality: An explanation of 1/fnoise” by Bak et al. (1987), the idea has been applied to solar physics, in “Avalanches and the Distribution of Solar
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• 2019
This work examines the inter-event distribution of extreme avalanches generated by the BTW mechanism on symmetrical and asymmetrical self-similar lattices and posit that the deviations of the observed probability distribution from the exponential one do not affect the unpredictability of extremes drawn from the waiting time between them.
Expanding and self-organizing 2D universe models emerging from frozen trivalent spin networks
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Symmetry
• 2020
A 1D chain of neuron-like elements is studied and it is found that the dynamics in the N-phase is indeed featured by positive stochastic Lyapunov exponents and dominated by (anti)instantonic processes of (creation) annihilation of kinks and antikinks, which can be viewed as predecessors of boundaries of neuroavalanches.
1/x power-law in a close proximity of the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld sandpile
• Physics
Scientific reports
• 2021
It is established that clustering of the events in space and time together with the core principles revealed by BTW lead to approximately 1/x power-law in the size-frequency distribution of model events.
Self-organized criticality and pattern emergence through the lens of tropical geometry
• Computer Science
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• 2018
The discovery of a tropical model with self-organized criticality (SOC) behavior is reported, which is continuous, in contrast to all known models of SOC, and is a certain scaling limit of the sandpile model, the first and archetypical model of SOC.
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• J. Bettinger
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Progress in biophysics and molecular biology
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The emergence of weak criticality in SOC systems
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EPL (Europhysics Letters)
• 2018
Since Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) was introduced in 1987, both the nature of the self-organisation and the criticality remains controversial. Recent observations on rain precipitation and brain

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Studies of complexity in extended dissipative dynamical systems, in nature and in laboratory, require multiple approaches and the framework of self-organized criticality (SOC) has been used
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• Physics
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