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Statistical physics and thermodynamics provide a framework for relating the behaviour of microscopic particles to the macroscopic properties of a system. Thermodynamics casts these macroscopic, or observable, properties in terms of variables that are subject to constraints imposed by the four laws of thermodynamics, which can be explained by statistical physics.
Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.
Frustrated magnetic systems typically have multiple ground state configurations. While such multistability is common in amorphous materials, periodic mechanical systems have long range elastic interactions that tend to lead to a long-range ordered ground state. Herein, Sirote-Katz, Shohat et al. introduce periodic mechanical systems that have many disordered metastable states.
Universality of critical behaviour of O(N) field theories on regular homogeneous lattices is established, but open questions remain for more complex lattices. Bighin et al. study universality on a non-homogeneous graph showing that its scaling theory is controlled by a single parameter, the spectral dimension.
Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.
Can many-body systems be beneficial to designing quantum technologies? We address this question by examining quantum engines, where recent studies indicate potential benefits through the harnessing of many-body effects, such as divergences close to phase transitions. However, open questions remain regarding their real-world applications.
During extreme storms, the failure of a small fraction of transmission lines can trigger a cascade of outages in a power grid. Going beyond static approaches, it is now demonstrated that resolving the spatio-temporal interactions between the storm and the power grid is key to identifying these critical lines.
Stable regions in four-dimensional phase space have been observed by following the motion of accelerated proton beams subject to nonlinear forces. This provides insights into the physics of dynamical systems and may lead to improved accelerator designs.
Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.