Self-Organized Criticality

Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) is a dynamical systems framework introduced by Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld in 1987 to explain how large, dissipative systems spontaneously evolve toward a critical state without external fine-tuning. At the critical state, the system produces scale-invariant fluctuations — avalanches whose size and duration follow power-law distributions — and generates 1/f (pink) noise in its power spectrum.