Self-Organized Criticality Induced by Diversity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that diversity in natural periods of integrate-and-fire oscillators induces self-organized criticality, with the system undergoing multiple phase transitions and exhibiting criticality over a broad parameter range.

Contribution

It reveals that diversity can induce SOC in oscillator populations and characterizes the transitions and parameter ranges where criticality occurs.

Findings

Diversity induces SOC in oscillator populations.

Multiple phase transitions from supercritical to subcritical regimes.

Criticality persists over a wide range of control parameters.

Abstract

We have studied the collective behavior of a population of integrate-and-fire oscillators. We show that diversity, introduced in terms of a random distribution of natural periods, is the mechanism that permits to observe self-organized criticality (SOC) in the long time regime. As diversity increases the system undergoes several transitions from a supercritical regime to a subcritical one, crossing the SOC region. Although there are resemblances with percolation, we give proofs that criticality takes place for a wide range of values of the control parameter instead of a single value.