  Sudden transitions in the state of a system are often undesirable in natural
and human-made systems. Such transitions under fast variation of system
parameters are called rate-induced tipping. We experimentally demonstrate
rate-induced tipping in a real-world complex system and decipher its mechanism.
There is a critical rate of change of parameter above which the system
undergoes tipping. We show that another system parameter, not under our
control, changes simultaneously at a different rate, and the competition
between the effects of that parameter and the control parameter determines if
and when tipping occurs. Motivated by the experiments, we use a nonlinear
oscillator model exhibiting Hopf bifurcation to generalize this tipping to
complex systems in which slow and fast parameters compete to determine the
system dynamics.
