Stochasticity induced transition from homeostasis to catastrophe

What are the signatures of the onset of catastrophe? Here we present the rich system physics characterizing the stochasticity driven transition from homeostasis to breakdown in an experimentally motivated and analytically tractable minimal model. Recent high-precision experiments on individual bacterial cells, growing and dividing repeatedly in a variety of environments, have revealed a previously unknown intergenerational scaling law which not only uniquely determines the stochastic map governing homeostasis, but also, as we show here, offers quantitative insights into the transition from the "conspiracy principle" regime (homeostasis) to the "catastrophe principle" regime and then to system breakdown. These transitions occur as a single parameter is tuned; we predict the precise values of the parameter which mark the characteristic progression of the transition. Emergence of asymptotically scale invariant distributions with quantifiable power law tails and the reverse monotonicity of the conditional exceedance distribution further characterize the transition to catastrophe.