Absence of Detailed Balance in Ecology
Statistical Mechanics
2012-11-20 v1 Biological Physics
Populations and Evolution
Abstract
Living systems are typically characterized by irreversible processes. A condition equivalent to the reversibility is the detailed balance, whose absence is an obstacle for analytically solving ecological models. We revisit a promising model with an elegant field-theoretic analytic solution and show that the theoretical analysis is invalid because of an implicit assumption of detailed balance. A signature of the difficulties is evident in the inconsistencies appearing in the many-point correlation functions and in the analytical formula for the species area relationship.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.5819,
title = {Absence of Detailed Balance in Ecology},
author = {Jacopo Grilli and Sandro Azaele and Jayanth R. Banavar and Amos Maritan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.5819},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
8 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in EPL