2020/02/29 by Christian Kuehn, Christian Bick · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Mathematics · #nlin.AO #cond-mat.stat-mech #math-ph #math.DS #math.MP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abe3824
published as Science Advances, 7(16), eabe3824, 2021 · revised version; 13 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2021/02/22 · arxiv updated 2021/04/27
Critical transitions are observed in many complex systems. This includes the onset of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators or the emergence an epidemic state within a population. "Explosive" first-order transitions have caught particular attention in a variety of systems when classical models are generalized by incorporating additional effects. Here we give a mathematical argument that the emergence of such first-order transitions is not surprising but rather a universally expected effect: Varying a classical model along a generic two-parameter family must lead to a change of the criticality. To illustrate our framework, we give three explicit examples of the effect in distinct physical systems: a model of adaptive epidemic dynamics, for a generalization of the Kuramoto model, and for a percolation transition.