Anomalous relaxation and self-organization in nonequilibrium processes - art. no. 067102

We study thermal relaxation in ordered arrays of coupled nonlinear elements with external driving. We find that our model exhibits dynamic self-organi zation manifested in a universal stretched-exponential form of relaxation. We identify two types of self-organization, cooperative and anticooperative . which lead to fast and slow relaxation, respectively. We give a qualitati ve explanation for the behavior of the stretched exponent in different para meter ranges. We emphasize that this is a system exhibiting stretched-expon ential relaxation without explicit disorder or frustration.