Related papers: Physics and Complexity: a brief spin glass perspec…
This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…
In this talk I present some of the recent theoretical results that have been obtained on glassy systems like spin glasses or structural glasses. The physical principles at the basis of the theory are explained in a simple language (without…
The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…
A broad set of empirical phenomenon in the study of social, economic and machine behaviour can be modelled as complex systems with averaging dynamics. However many of these models naturally result in consensus or consensus-like outcomes. In…
Strongly interacting quantum many-body systems are fundamentally compelling and ubiquitous in science. However, their complexity generally prevents exact solutions of their dynamics. Precisely engineered ultracold atomic gases are emerging…
Methods of statistical physics have proven valuable for studying the evolution of cooperation in social dilemma games. However, recent empirical research shows that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is only one kind of a more general…
This paper has two main parts. The first one presents a direct path from microscopic dynamics to Debye screening, Landau damping and collisional transport. It shows there is more simplicity in microscopic plasma physics than previously…
The origin of macroscopic complexity is traced in a wide range of systems (imunology, ecology, finance, marketing, etc) to the discrete and auto-catalytic (i.e. multiplicative) character of their elementary components. Even in the simplest…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
The Principle of Least Action has evolved and established itself as the most basic law of physics. This allows us to see how this fundamental law of nature determines the development of the system towards states with less action, i.e.,…
Economic choices are often stochastic: the same person may make a different choice when facing the same alternatives repeatedly. Standard models assume that the degree of randomness reflects the size of utility differences, but choice…
Spin-glass systems are universal models for representing many-body phenomena in statistical physics and computer science. High quality solutions of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be encoded into low energy states of…
Revealing physical interactions in complex systems from observed collective dynamics constitutes a fundamental inverse problem in science. Current reconstruction methods require access to a system's model or dynamical data at a level of…
The word "complexity" is most often used as a meta--linguistic expression referring to certain intuitive characteristics of a natural system and/or its scientific description. These characteristics may include: sheer amount of data that…
In Physics, we have laws that determine the time evolution of a given physical system, depending on its parameters and its initial conditions. When we have multi-stable systems, many attractors coexist so that their basins of attraction…
In this paper, we discuss the question whether a physical "simplification" of a model makes it always easier to study, at least from a mathematical and numerical point of view. To this end, we give different examples showing that these…
In complex systems, many different parts interact in non-obvious ways. Traditional research focuses on a few or a single aspect of the problem so as to analyze it with the tools available. To get a better insight of phenomena that emerge…
Complex networks describe a wide range of systems in nature and society, much quoted examples including the cell, a network of chemicals linked by chemical reactions, or the Internet, a network of routers and computers connected by physical…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
The application of Statistical Physics to social systems is mainly related to the search for macroscopic laws, that can be derived from experimental data averaged in time or space,assuming the system in a steady state. One of the major…