Tipping usually happens gradually: a control parameter drifts across a threshold, and the system snaps to a new state. Shock-induced tipping is different. The parameter jumps, lands in a bistable region, and the system falls into the basin of attraction of whichever state it's closer to. The jump is fast; the consequence is permanent.
Bhadra, Radhakrishnan, and Sujith demonstrate this experimentally for the first time in a thermoacoustic system — a horizontal Rijke tube where an electrically heated grid drives acoustic oscillations through feedback between unsteady heat release and sound waves. They abruptly increase the voltage to the grid. The power shock raises the grid temperature, pushing the system into a bistable regime where both quiescence and limit-cycle oscillations are stable attractors. If the shock is large enough, the system tips into self-sustained oscillations and stays there.
The mechanism has two parts. First, the voltage shock creates a temperature shock in the grid, because the grid's thermal inertia introduces a lag between electrical input and thermal response. Second, the elevated temperature changes the heat-transfer dynamics enough to move the system's state into the basin of attraction of the oscillatory fixed point. Once there, the system remains — removing the shock doesn't reverse the tip, because the bistability means the oscillatory state is locally stable.
The size of the shock matters, not its duration. A brief but large pulse can tip the system; a sustained but small increase may not. This is the signature of basin boundary crossing rather than parameter tracking.
The result is a cautionary template. Systems with bistability are vulnerable not just to slow drift but to single events. The event doesn't have to persist. It just has to push hard enough, once, to cross the basin boundary. After that, the system's own dynamics hold it in the new state.