Stabilizing thermodynamically unstable phases in many-body systems, such as suppressing pathological neuronal synchronization in Parkinson’s disease or maintaining magnetic order across broad temperature ranges, remains a persistent challenge. In traditional approaches, such phases are stabilized through intervening in the dynamics of all system constituents or introducing additional interactions. Here, we offer a hitherto-unexplored alternative, namely, subsystem resetting, whereby intervention in the dynamics of only a part of the system, and that too only occasionally in time, is implemented through resetting its state to a reset configuration. Just playing with a few parameters, e.g., the nature of the reset configuration and the size of the reset subsystem, one achieves a remarkable and robust control over the phase diagram of the bare dynamics. We demonstrate that these universal effects span a wide variety of scenarios, including equilibrium and nonequilibrium, mean-field and non-mean-field dynamics, with and without quenched disorder. Despite the challenges posed by memory effects, we obtain explicit analytical predictions, validated by simulations.

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• Phase transitions
• Stochastic processes
• Stochastic resetting
• Synchronization transition