Self-organized criticality as Witten-type topological field theory with spontaneously broken Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry

Criticality or Supersymmetry Breaking?

In many stochastic dynamical systems, ordinary chaotic behavior is preceded by a full-dimensional phase that exhibits 1/f-type power spectra and/or scale-free statistics of (anti)instantons such as neuroavalanches, earthquakes, etc. In contrast with the phenomenological concept of self-organized criticality, the recently found approximation-free supersymmetric theory of stochastics (STS) identifies this phase as the noise-induced chaos (N-phase), i.e., the phase where the topological supersymmetry pertaining to all stochastic dynamical systems is broken spontaneously by the condensation of the noise-induced (anti)instantons. Here, we support this picture in the context of neurodynamics. We study a 1D chain of neuron-like elements and find that the dynamics in the N-phase is indeed featured by positive stochastic Lyapunov exponents and dominated by (anti)instantonic processes of (creation) annihilation of kinks and antikinks, which can be viewed as predecessors of boundaries of neuroavalanches. We also construct the phase diagram of emulated stochastic neurodynamics on Spikey neuromorphic hardware and demonstrate that the width of the N-phase vanishes in the deterministic limit in accordance with STS. As a first result of the application of STS to neurodynamics comes the conclusion that a conscious brain can reside only in the N-phase.

Topological field theory of dynamical systems

Here, it is shown that the path-integral representation of any stochastic or deterministic continuous-time dynamical model is a cohomological or Witten-type topological field theory, i.e., a model with global topological supersymmetry (Q-symmetry). As many other supersymmetries, Q-symmetry must be perturbatively stable due to what is generically known as non-renormalization theorems. As a result, all (equilibrium) dynamical models are divided into three major categories: Markovian models with unbroken Q-symmetry, chaotic models with Q-symmetry spontaneously broken on the mean-field level by, e.g., fractal invariant sets (e.g., strange attractors), and intermittent or self-organized critical (SOC) models with Q-symmetry dynamically broken by the condensation of instanton-antiinstanton configurations (earthquakes, avalanches, etc.) SOC is a full-dimensional phase separating chaos and Markovian dynamics. In the deterministic limit, however, antiinstantons disappear and SOC collapses into the "edge of chaos." Goldstone theorem stands behind spatio-temporal self-similarity of Q-broken phases known under such names as algebraic statistics of avalanches, 1/f noise, sensitivity to initial conditions, etc. Other fundamental differences of Q-broken phases is that they can be effectively viewed as quantum dynamics and that they must also have time-reversal symmetry spontaneously broken. Q-symmetry breaking in non-equilibrium situations (quenches, Barkhausen effect, etc.) is also briefly discussed.