when: 29 April 2005
where: McConnell 320
abstract:
In this talk I shall present certain common features of complex many-body systems.
The appearance of scale-invariance, power laws and emergent behaviour in these systems
has long interested physicists, who have made various attempts to understand it.
Self-organized criticality (SOC) is one such mechanism proposed to explain
the common dynamical state of several of these
complex systems. I shall present a brief sketch of the main ideas behind SOC,
and some examples.
