Statistical physics, thermodynamics and nonlinear dynamics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of technological development on social sphere lack strong empirical foundation. Here the authors presented quantitative analysis of the phenomenon of social acceleration across a range of digital datasets and found that interest appears in bursts that dissipate on decreasing timescales and occur with increasing frequency.

    • Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
    • , Bjarke Mørch Mønsted
    •  & Sune Lehmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deterministic maps from initial to final states can always be modelled using the master equation formalism, provided additional “hidden” states are available. Here, the authors demonstrate a tradeoff between the required number of such states and the number of required, suitably defined “hidden time steps”.

    • David H. Wolpert
    • , Artemy Kolchinsky
    •  & Jeremy A. Owen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Supply demand equilibria in modern macroeconomic theories do not hold during recessionary shocks. Here the authors developed a non-equilibrium theory for the susceptibility of industrial sectors to shocks and showed these susceptibilities vary across countries, sectors and time and full economic recovery may take six to ten years.

    • Peter Klimek
    • , Sebastian Poledna
    •  & Stefan Thurner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In areas with two or more spoken languages, linguistic shift may occur as speakers of one language switch to the other. Here, the authors show that linguistic shift is faster in rural compared to urban regions of Galicia, a bilingual community in Spain, due to the competition of internal complexity and network relevance.

    • Mariamo Mussa Juane
    • , Luis F. Seoane
    •  & Jorge Mira

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The determination of entropy production from experimental data is a challenge but a recently introduced theoretical tool, the thermodynamic uncertainty relation, allows one to infer a lower bound on entropy production. Here the authors provide a critical assessment of the practical implementation of this tool.

    • Junang Li
    • , Jordan M. Horowitz
    •  & Nikta Fakhri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The scrambling of quantum information in a many-body system leads to the emergence of statistical mechanics and chaotic behaviour. Here the authors establish quantitative relationships between experimentally-measureable correlators, the Rényi entropy and Lyapunov exponents in the Dicke model.

    • R. J. Lewis-Swan
    • , A. Safavi-Naini
    •  & A. M. Rey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spin ice compounds have localised excitations that behave as magnetic monopoles which move by hopping from site to site, creating a chain of spins. Here the authors show that the hyperfine coupling between electron and nuclear spins is an important part of the mechanism underlying monopole motion.

    • C. Paulsen
    • , S. R. Giblin
    •  & S. T. Bramwell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Identifying the nature of the glass transition is challenging because relevant experiments or analytical descriptions are hard to achieve. Here, Berthier et al. develop a Monte Carlo numerical tool to investigate two-dimensional glasses and find a zero-temperature thermodynamic glass transition.

    • Ludovic Berthier
    • , Patrick Charbonneau
    •  & Sho Yaida

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Computational protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction has the potential to complement experimental efforts to map interactomes. Here, the authors show that proteins tend to interact if one is similar to the other’s partners and that PPI prediction based on this principle is highly accurate.

    • István A. Kovács
    • , Katja Luck
    •  & Albert-László Barabási

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Magnetic spin ice compounds are described by vertex models, which have been intensively studied for their exotic properties. Bovo et al. show thin films of Dy2Ti2O7 have structures distinct from bulk crystals and come close to realising the two-dimensional F-model, which has an unusual ordering transition in the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless class.

    • L. Bovo
    • , C. M. Rouleau
    •  & S. T. Bramwell

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Are scale-free networks rare or universal? Important or not? We present the recent research about degree distributions of networks. This is a controversial topic, but, we argue, with some adjustments of the terminology, it does not have to be.

    • Petter Holme

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Real-world networks are often said to be ”scale free”, meaning their degree distribution follows a power law. Broido and Clauset perform statistical tests of this claim using a large and diverse corpus of real-world networks, showing that scale-free structure is far from universal.

    • Anna D. Broido
    •  & Aaron Clauset

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active fluids consist of self-driven particles which consume energy to drive spontaneous flow. Here the authors present a general theory of two-dimensional chiral active particles which spontaneously rotate and show that they can form a stable, coherently-rotating phase.

    • Ananyo Maitra
    •  & Martin Lenz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    With ever-growing datasets, it is useful to filter out details and keep only the links that carry the relevant structural information. Here the authors generalize the disparity filter by providing a tolerance parameter that can be used to tune how strict the filter is in the selection of edges to preserve.

    • Riccardo Marcaccioli
    •  & Giacomo Livan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An analog of Alfven waves in plasma with velocity set by magnetic tension has been predicted to appear in elastic turbulence. Here the authors observe elastic Alfven waves in elastic turbulence of polymer solution flow between two obstacles where the velocity is defined by elastic stress.

    • Atul Varshney
    •  & Victor Steinberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Energy-efficient manipulation of spins at the nanoscale can advance magnetic storage and computing technologies. Here the authors show that low-dimensional chaos generated by alternating spin torque can induce magnetic switching in a nanoscale ferromagnet.

    • Eric Arturo Montoya
    • , Salvatore Perna
    •  & Ilya N. Krivorotov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Kitaev model is intensively studied as an exactly-solvable starting point for theoretical studies of quantum spin liquid states. Hickey and Trebst show that magnetic fields can destabilize the well-known gapped Kitaev spin liquid and induce a new gapless spin liquid, with a distinct gauge structure and neutral Fermi surface.

    • Ciarán Hickey
    •  & Simon Trebst

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Percolation is a tool used to investigate a network’s response as random links are removed. Here the author presents a generic analytic theory to describe how percolation properties are affected in coloured networks, where the colour can represent a network feature such as multiplexity or the belonging to a community.

    • Ivan Kryven

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological phases of matter are determined by its symmetries and dimension. Here the authors show that in non-Hermitian systems, such as those with gain and loss, time-reversal and particle-hole symmetries are equivalent to each other, unifying otherwise distinct topological classes and leading to emergent non-Hermitian topological phases.

    • Kohei Kawabata
    • , Sho Higashikawa
    •  & Masahito Ueda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Complex networks can be useful to describe social interactions but for large datasets one needs to identify significant links to extract information. While most existing methods work for static networks, here the authors propose a method to extract the backbone of significant links in temporal networks.

    • Teruyoshi Kobayashi
    • , Taro Takaguchi
    •  & Alain Barrat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studying quantum heat machines would extend our fundamental understanding of thermodynamics. Here, the authors report on absorption refrigeration within three normal modes of motion of a three-ion chain, studying performances using either thermal or squeezed states, also in the single-shot regime.

    • Gleb Maslennikov
    • , Shiqian Ding
    •  & Dzmitry Matsukevich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluids may avoid crystallization via an underlying mechanism that remains hotly debated. Teich et al. show that hard polyhedral particles form glass because of the competition of local structural motifs, each of which is prevalent in crystals self-assembled from particles of closely related shapes.

    • Erin G. Teich
    • , Greg van Anders
    •  & Sharon C. Glotzer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is becoming clear that the dynamics of transcription factors may be important for gene regulation. Here, the authors study the implications of oscillatory and chaotic dynamics of NF-κB and demonstrate that it allows a degree of control of gene expression and can generate phenotypic heterogeneity.

    • Mathias L. Heltberg
    • , Sandeep Krishna
    •  & Mogens H. Jensen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The nature of the vibrational modes of amorphous solids is of fundamental interest, but assessing them is challenging due to very long equilibrium times involved. Wang et al. numerically model the localized low-frequency vibrational modes in glasses and show the sensitivity of their populations to glass stability.

    • Lijin Wang
    • , Andrea Ninarello
    •  & Elijah Flenner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of 'fake news’, spread via social media, has been much discussed in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Here, the authors use data on 30 million tweets to show how content classified as fake news diffused on Twitter before the election.

    • Alexandre Bovet
    •  & Hernán A. Makse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The study of interfaces in bacterial systems is of relevance to the spreading of bacterial colonies and pathological infections. Here the authors investigate the dynamics of active/passive interfaces in bacterial swarms and find that the boundary can be described as a propagating, diffuse elastic interface.

    • Alison E. Patteson
    • , Arvind Gopinath
    •  & Paulo E. Arratia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Similarly to entropy, majorization allows to quantify deviation from uniformity in a wide range of fields. In this paper, the authors use its generalization to the quantum realm to derive a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for thermal transformations of quantum states.

    • Gilad Gour
    • , David Jennings
    •  & Iman Marvian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Significant improvements in numerical methods for quantum systems often come from finding new ways of representing quantum states that can be optimized and simulated more efficiently. Here the authors demonstrate a method to calculate exact neural network representations of many-body ground states.

    • Giuseppe Carleo
    • , Yusuke Nomura
    •  & Masatoshi Imada

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Predicting plastic deformation in crystals remains challenging owing to the nonlinear nature of stochastic avalanches involved, which resemble the critical phenomena. Salmenjoki et al. use machine learning to predict plastic deformation and show that it works better for those under large strains.

    • Henri Salmenjoki
    • , Mikko J. Alava
    •  & Lasse Laurson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Magic number cluster with closed shells and increased stability often result from potential energy minimization between attractive atoms or particles. Here, Wang et al. show that such magic number clusters can also result from entropy maximization in colloidal systems with negligible interactions.

    • Junwei Wang
    • , Chrameh Fru Mbah
    •  & Nicolas Vogel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active matter describes a group of interacting units showing collective motions by constantly consuming energy from the environment, but inertia has largely been overlooked in this context. Scholz et al. show how important it can be by characterizing the dynamics of self-propelled particles in a model system.

    • Christian Scholz
    • , Soudeh Jahanshahi
    •  & Hartmut Löwen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Adapting statistical physics tools to study active systems is challenging due to their non-equilibrium nature. Here the authors use simulations to present a phase diagram of a 2D active system, showing a two-step melting scenario far from equilibrium along with gas-liquid motility-induced phase separation.

    • Juliane U. Klamser
    • , Sebastian C. Kapfer
    •  & Werner Krauth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is often advantageous to transform a strongly nonlinear system into a linear one in order to simplify its analysis for prediction and control. Here the authors combine dynamical systems with deep learning to identify these hard-to-find transformations.

    • Bethany Lusch
    • , J. Nathan Kutz
    •  & Steven L. Brunton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Online misinformation is a threat to a well-informed electorate and undermines democracy. Here, the authors analyse the spread of articles on Twitter, find that bots play a major role in the spread of low-credibility content and suggest control measures for limiting the spread of misinformation.

    • Chengcheng Shao
    • , Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
    •  & Filippo Menczer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Continuous-time computation paradigm could represent a viable alternative to the standard digital one when dealing with certain classes of problems. Here, the authors propose a generalised version of a continuous-time solver and simulate its performances in solving MaxSAT and two-colour Ramsey problems.

    • Botond Molnár
    • , Ferenc Molnár
    •  & Mária Ercsey-Ravasz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    For various organisms, mRNA and protein copy numbers scale with cell volume. Here, the authors show that this result emerges naturally when ribosomes and RNAPs limit expression. Furthermore, the authors show that within their model this result breaks down for a sufficiently high volume/DNA ratio.

    • Jie Lin
    •  & Ariel Amir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    “Diffusing diffusivity” concept has been recently put forward to account for rapid structural rearrangements in soft matter and biological systems. Here the authors propose a general mathematical framework to compute the distribution of first-passage times in a dynamically heterogeneous medium.

    • Yann Lanoiselée
    • , Nicolas Moutal
    •  & Denis S. Grebenkov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Self-folding origami have applications for mechanical metamaterials but one of their pitfalls is that many undesirable folding modes exist. Here the authors propose an algorithm to determine which folding joints to make stiffer in order to ensure that the sheet is folded into the chosen state.

    • Menachem Stern
    • , Viraaj Jayaram
    •  & Arvind Murugan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    At low temperatures and dimensionality it has become possible to probe the quantum limits of heat transport. Tavakoli et al. show that heat transport through a one-dimensional device can be dominated by non-ideal transmission instead of reaching the regime of thermal conductance quantization.

    • Adib Tavakoli
    • , Kunal Lulla
    •  & Olivier Bourgeois

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding fundamental processes that occur using solar-to-fuel conversion materials is crucial for constructing effective renewable energy collection. Here, authors find the hydrogen peroxide light-driven hole-scavenging mechanism over haematite to proceed with two active sites rather than one

    • Yotam Y. Avital
    • , Hen Dotan
    •  & Arik Yochelis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spin ice materials are defined by ice rules, local constraints that lead to frustrated interactions and macroscopic numbers of degenerate configurations. Here the authors show that the ice rule in colloidal ice is emergent, limited to certain geometries, and demonstrate how it can break down under changes of the lattice structure.

    • András Libál
    • , Dong Yun Lee
    •  & Cristiano Nisoli

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