Self-Organized Bistability Associated With First-Order Phase Transitions
  Self-organized criticality elucidates the conditions under which physical and biological systems tune themselves to the edge of a second-order phase transition, with scale invariance. Motivated by the empirical observation of bimodal distributions of activity in neuroscience and other fields, we propose and analyze a theory for the self-organization to the point of phase-coexistence in systems exhibiting a first-order phase transition. It explains the emergence of regular avalanches with attributes of scale-invariance which coexist with huge anomalous ones, with realizations in many fields. 
Serena di Santo, Raffaella Burioni, Alessandro Vezzani and Miguel A.   Mu\~noz
cond-mat.stat-mech physics.bio-ph q-bio.QM