Per bak physics
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Per bak physics
Per Bak
Danish physicist
Per Bak (8 December 1948 – 16 October 2002) was a Danishtheoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term "self-organized criticality."
Life and work
After receiving his Ph.D.
from the Technical University of Denmark in 1974, Bak worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He specialized in phase transitions, such as those occurring when an insulator suddenly becomes a conductor or when water freezes.
In that context, he also did important work on complicated spatially modulated (magnetic) structures in solids.
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This research led him to the more general question of how organization emerges from disorder.
In 1987, he and two postdoctoral researchers, Chao Tang and Kurt Wiesenfeld, published an article in Physical Review Letters setting a new concept they called self-organized criticality.
The first discovered example of a dynamical system displaying such self-organized criticality, the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld sandpile m