Statistical physics, thermodynamics and nonlinear dynamics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Interacting self-propelled particles exhibit phase separation or collective motion depending on particle shape. A unified theory connecting these paradigms represents a major challenge in active matter, which the authors address here by modeling active particles as continuum fields.

    • Robert Großmann
    • , Igor S. Aranson
    •  & Fernando Peruani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    At small scales, structural heterogeneities limit what a sensor can learn about the properties of a material. Here, the authors quantify these limits and determine the optimal measurement protocols, which depend on both the spatial resolution of the sensor and the number of probes.

    • Farzan Beroz
    • , Di Zhou
    •  & David K. Lubensky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hydrogen has multiple molecular phases which are challenging to explore computationally. The authors develop a machine-learning approach, learning from reference ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, to derive a transferable hierarchical force model that provides insight into high pressure phases and the melting line of H2.

    • Hongxiang Zong
    • , Heather Wiebe
    •  & Graeme J. Ackland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The static and dynamic behavior of condensed phases residing on curved surfaces can be fundamentally different from their counterparts in Euclidean space. Singh et al. test several competing glass theories on colloidal liquids confined to the surface of a sphere and show they behave like 3D bulk liquids.

    • Navneet Singh
    • , A. K. Sood
    •  & Rajesh Ganapathy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dynamic pricing schemes are increasingly employed in on-demand mobility. Here the authors show that ride-hailing services across the globe exhibit anomalous price surges induced by collective action of drivers, uncovered from price time-series at 137 locations, and explain under which conditions they emerge.

    • Malte Schröder
    • , David-Maximilian Storch
    •  & Marc Timme

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heterogenous ice nucleation is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but predicting the ice nucleation ability of a substrate is challenging. Here the authors develop a machine-learning data-driven approach to predict the ice nucleation ability of substrates, which is based on four descriptors related to physical properties of the interface.

    • Martin Fitzner
    • , Philipp Pedevilla
    •  & Angelos Michaelides

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heat flux is well understood on macroscopic scales, however when the system size is reduced, novel phenomena are induced by fluctuations. Here, the authors demonstrate phonon heat transport between two nanomechanical resonators coupled by cavity enhanced interactions exhibiting an oscillating heat flux.

    • Cheng Yang
    • , Xinrui Wei
    •  & Haibin Wu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    According to Zipf’s law, the population size of a city is inversely proportional to its size rank in any urban system. The authors show how demography explains this law as a time average of balanced migration between cities and how deviations express information about people’s net preferences.

    • Luís M. A. Bettencourt
    •  & Daniel Zünd

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The entanglement in non-critical ground states is conjectured to obey the area law, which is believed to arise from the short-range nature of interactions. Here the authors prove that the entanglement area law rigorously holds in one-dimensional systems even in the presence of long-range interactions.

    • Tomotaka Kuwahara
    •  & Keiji Saito

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brownian motion places the ultimate limit on microorganisms’ ability to navigate. Thornton et al. show that Haloarchaea have a strategy of slow swimming and infrequent reorientation that exploits the randomising nature of Brownian motion to achieve optimal chemotaxis at the thermodynamic limit.

    • Katie L. Thornton
    • , Jaimi K. Butler
    •  & Laurence G. Wilson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantum heat transport may be realized in superconducting circuits which has to rely on magnetic flux as a sole control parameter. Here, the authors report electric field tuning of photonic thermal conductance and observe heat flow oscillations in a magnetic field-free superconducting circuit.

    • Olivier Maillet
    • , Diego Subero
    •  & Jukka P. Pekola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active colloidal systems can serve as an enabling platform to study complex out-of-equilibrium physical phenomena. Using a magnetic control with a feedback loop, here the authors program the dynamics of active Brownian particles by updating their rotational diffusion coefficient depending on their locations.

    • Miguel Angel Fernandez-Rodriguez
    • , Fabio Grillo
    •  & Lucio Isa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient strategies to optimize metamaterial design for specific applications are urgently needed despite the rapid progress in this area. Here the authors propose a computational method combining an optimization algorithm with discrete element simulations for the automatic design of mechanical metamaterial actuators.

    • Silvia Bonfanti
    • , Roberto Guerra
    •  & Stefano Zapperi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the synchronization of human networks is important in many aspects, but current research is suffering from limited control and noisy environments. Shahal et al. show a quantitative study with full control over the network connectivity, coupling strength and delay among interacting violin players.

    • Shir Shahal
    • , Ateret Wurzberg
    •  & Moti Fridman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Both the mathematics and outcomes of the Method of Reflections (MR) and Fitness and Complexity algorithm (FC) approaches differ largely. Here the authors recast both methods in a mathematical and multidimensional framework to reconcile both and show that the conflicts between the two methodologies to measure economic complexity can be resolved by a neat mathematical method based on linear-algebra tools within a bipartite-networks framework.

    • Carla Sciarra
    • , Guido Chiarotti
    •  & Francesco Laio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex systems in the real world are often characterized by connected patterns interacting between each other in multiple ways. Here, Della Rossa et al. describe a general method to determine symmetries in multilayer networks and then relate them to different synchronization modes that the networks can exhibit.

    • Fabio Della Rossa
    • , Louis Pecora
    •  & Francesco Sorrentino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designing efficient artificial networks able to quickly converge to optimal performance for a given task remains a challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate a relation between criticality, task-performance and information theoretic fingerprint in a spiking neuromorphic network with synaptic plasticity.

    • Benjamin Cramer
    • , David Stöckel
    •  & Viola Priesemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is crucial to understand the evolving structure of global liner shipping system. Here the authors unveiled the architecture of a recent global liner shipping network (GLSN) and show that the structure of global liner shipping system has evolved to be self-organized with a trade-off between high transportation efficiency and low wiring cost and ports’ gateway-ness is most highly associated with ports’ economic performance.

    • Mengqiao Xu
    • , Qian Pan
    •  & Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The systemic risk of real-world financial networks is understudied. Here the authors focused on the guarantee network among Chinese firms and found that the global financial crisis during 2007-2008 and economic policies in the aftermath had significant influence on the evolution of guarantee network structure.

    • Yingli Wang
    • , Qingpeng Zhang
    •  & Xiaoguang Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How UHI intensity responds to variations of urban structure is unclear. Here the authors proposed a reduced form approach that is able to estimate UHI intensities based only on the number and location of urban sites as well as their distance.

    • Yunfei Li
    • , Sebastian Schubert
    •  & Diego Rybski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While active matter exhibits unusual dynamics at low density, high density behavior has not been explored. Mandal et al. show that extreme dense active matter, shows a rich spectrum of behaviour from intermittent plastic bursts and turbulence, to glassy states and jamming in the limit of infinite persistence time.

    • Rituparno Mandal
    • , Pranab Jyoti Bhuyan
    •  & Madan Rao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Predicting thermal transport in low-thermal-conductivity (κL) materials is challenging. Here, the authors propose a dual-phonon theory, where normal phonons are treated using the Boltzmann thermal equation and diffuson-like phonons are treated within diffusion theory, yielding robust predictions of κL.

    • Yixiu Luo
    • , Xiaolong Yang
    •  & Xiulin Ruan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Living organisms, like fish and bacteria, frequently change their pattern as a group to cope with environment. Here, Bäuerle et al. reproduce this phenomenon using a synthetic system of controllably interactive colloids to show their collective motions that indicates being close to a critical point.

    • Tobias Bäuerle
    • , Robert C. Löffler
    •  & Clemens Bechinger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designing a scalable platform to generate electricity from the energy exchange mechanism between two surfaces separated by nanometer distances remains a challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate reconfigurable, scalable and fully integrated near-field thermo-photovoltaics for on-demand heat recycling.

    • Gaurang R. Bhatt
    • , Bo Zhao
    •  & Michal Lipson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding failure propagation dynamics in complex networks with recovery processes is vital to realizing networks that are resistant to large scale failures. Here, the authors report a model for general failure propagation dynamics in complex networks with non-Markovian recovery processes.

    • Zhao-Hua Lin
    • , Mi Feng
    •  & Ying-Cheng Lai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can easily uncover abstract associations. Here, the authors propose that higher-order associations arise from natural errors in learning and memory. They suggest that mental errors influence the humans’ representation of the world in significant and predictable ways.

    • Christopher W. Lynn
    • , Ari E. Kahn
    •  & Danielle S. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Population structure enables emergence of cooperation among individuals, but the impact of the dynamic nature of real interaction networks is not understood. Here, the authors study the evolution of cooperation on temporal networks and find that temporality enhances the evolution of cooperation.

    • Aming Li
    • , Lei Zhou
    •  & Simon A. Levin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quasiperiodic systems share features with disordered models but their underlying determinism give them distinct behaviour. Here the authors study the critical behaviour of quasiperiodic spin models and show that the renormalization group fixed points have couplings given by self-similar discrete sequences.

    • Utkarsh Agrawal
    • , Sarang Gopalakrishnan
    •  & Romain Vasseur

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Predicting and controlling traffic congestion propagation is an ongoing challenge in most urban settings. Here, Seberi et al. apply a contagion model describing epidemic spread in population to model traffic jams, and verify its validity using large-scale data from six different cities around the world.

    • Meead Saberi
    • , Homayoun Hamedmoghadam
    •  & Marta C. González

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenomena like imitation, herding and positive feedbacks in the complex financial markets characterize the emergence of endogenous instabilities, which however is still understudied. Here the authors show that the graph-based approach is helpful to timely recognize phases of increasing instability that can drive the system to a new market configuration.

    • Alessandro Spelta
    • , Andrea Flori
    •  & Fabio Pammolli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural network representations of quantum states are hoped to provide an efficient basis for numerical methods without the need for case-by-case trial wave functions. Here the authors show that limited generalization capacity of such representations is responsible for convergence problems for frustrated systems.

    • Tom Westerhout
    • , Nikita Astrakhantsev
    •  & Andrey A. Bagrov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Epithelial cell monolayers show remarkable displacement and velocity correlations over distances of ten or more cell sizes. Here the authors show that cell motility coupled to the collective elastic modes of the cell sheet is sufficient to produce characteristic swirl-like correlations.

    • Silke Henkes
    • , Kaja Kostanjevec
    •  & Eric Bertin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Description of non-equilibrium phase transitions is problematic, due to the absence of suitable free energy landscapes. Here, the authors experimentally show delayed photon condensation and timing jitter in a dye-filled microcavity, modelled by a non-equilibrium extension of the free-energy landscape.

    • Benjamin T. Walker
    • , João D. Rodrigues
    •  & Robert A. Nyman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The second law of thermodynamics cannot be straightforwardly applied to systems with non-Markovian feedback control, and previous extensions to cover that regime have not been tested experimentally. Here, the authors bridge this gap using an optically levitated microsphere in a feedback-cooling system.

    • Maxime Debiossac
    • , David Grass
    •  & Nikolai Kiesel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about how the speed of ecosystem collapse depends on ecosystem size. Here, Cooper, Willcock et al. analyse empirical data and models finding that although regime shift duration increases with ecosystem size, this relationship saturates and even large ecosystems can collapse in a few decades.

    • Gregory S. Cooper
    • , Simon Willcock
    •  & John A. Dearing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Twisting the relative orientation of the sheets in few-layer van der Waals materials can cause drastic changes in the electronic bandstructure. Here, the authors predict that twisted bilayer GeSe realises an effective one-dimensional flat-band electronic system with exotic, strongly correlated behaviour.

    • D. M. Kennes
    • , L. Xian
    •  & A. Rubio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cells exhibit exceptional chemical sensitivity, yet we haven’t fully understood how they achieve it. Here the authors consider the mutual information between signals and two coupled sensors as a proxy for sensing performance and show its optimisation depending on noise level and signal statistics.

    • Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn
    • , David J. Schwab
    •  & Greg J. Stephens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Honeybees have a sophisticated system to communicate foraging locations through a “dance”, but they also share food-related olfactory cues. Here, Hasenjager and colleagues use social network analysis to disentangle how foraging information is transmitted through these systems in different contexts.

    • Matthew J. Hasenjager
    • , William Hoppitt
    •  & Ellouise Leadbeater

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The design of future power grids with decentral control calls for a better understanding of the stability of synchronized networked systems. Here, Hellmann et al. show that the energy losses in coupled oscillators can significantly alter power grid dynamics by introducing solitary states in the network.

    • Frank Hellmann
    • , Paul Schultz
    •  & Yuri Maistrenko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Controlling chaotic behavior in spintronic devices is promising for signal-processing applications. Here, the authors unveil the symbolic patterns hidden in the magnetization dynamics of a nanocontact vortex oscillator and detail how to control chaos complexity with a single experimental parameter.

    • Myoung-Woo Yoo
    • , Damien Rontani
    •  & Joo-Von Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The likelihood of linking within a complex network is of importance to solve real-world problems, but it is challenging to predict. Sun et al. show that the link predictability limit can be well estimated by measuring the shortest compression length of a network without a need of prediction algorithm.

    • Jiachen Sun
    • , Ling Feng
    •  & Yanqing Hu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the C. elegans zygote, (anterior) aPAR and (posterior) pPAR proteins are key to polarity maintenance, what factors determine the selection of the polarity axis remains unclear. Here authors formulate a reaction-diffusion model in realistic cell geometry and find that long-axis polarisation is promoted by cytosolic dephosphorylation at onset and its steady state determined by minimising the length of the aPAR-pPAR interface.

    • Raphaela Geßele
    • , Jacob Halatek
    •  & Erwin Frey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantum calorimeters can provide time-resolved measurement of single photons by converting them to detectable temperature changes. Here the authors demonstrate a calorimeter that reaches the lower bound of temperature resolution, determined by the coupling to its heat bath and associated fluctuations.

    • Bayan Karimi
    • , Fredrik Brange
    •  & Jukka P. Pekola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Application-specific computational hardware helps to solve the limitations of conventional electronics in solving difficult calculation problems. Here the authors present a general heuristic algorithm to solve NP-Hard Ising problems in a photonics implementation.

    • Charles Roques-Carmes
    • , Yichen Shen
    •  & Marin Soljačić

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