Related papers: Physics and Complexity: a brief spin glass perspec…
Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…
Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging…
The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…
Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…
Complexity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, involving a variety of features including disorder, nonlinearity, and self-organisation. We use a recently developed rigorous framework for complexity to understand measures of complexity. We…
There is no compelling reason imposing that the methods of statistical mechanics should be restricted to the dynamical systems which follow the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs prescriptions. More specifically, ubiquitous natural and artificial…
We introduce and discuss the concept of \textit{arrangement}, traditionally found in the context of chemical reactions and few-body rearrangement collisions, in the general context of an $N$-body quantum system. We show that the ability for…
Glasses are ubiquitous amorphous solids that remain one of the big mysteries in condensed matter. Despite the vast body of literature on glasses, a unifying approach to link the structure and dynamics of glasses is still missing. A growing…
Complexity is a measure of information content. Crystalline materials are not complex systems because their structures can be represented tersely using the language of crystallography. Disordered materials are also structurally simple if…
The dynamics of supercooled liquid and glassy systems are usually studied within the Lagrangian representation, in which the positions and velocities of distinguishable interacting particles are followed. Within this representation,…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
As the current thermo-industrial civilization expands, its technological and societal complexities increase. We suggest that physical power, economic activity and societal complexity are linked. A simple, intuitive model based on Systems…
Dynamic Complexity is a phenomenon exhibited by a nonlinearly interacting system within which multitudes of different sizes of large scale coherent structures emerge, resulting in a globally nonlinear stochastic behavior vastly different…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
We discuss a simple model of particles hopping in one dimension with attractive interactions. Taking a hydrodynamic limit in which the interaction strength increases with the system size, we observe the formation of multiple clusters of…
Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…
Galaxies and galaxy clusters are observed to have a rather non-trivial radial behaviour. The observations show that the radial profiles change from one power-law profile near the centre to another power-law profile in the outer region. We…
A key challenge in complex design problems that permeate science and engineering is the need to balance design objectives for specific design elements or subsystems with global system objectives. Global objectives give rise to competing…
Within the wide class of disordered materials, spin glasses occupy a special place because of their conceptually simple definition of randomly interacting spins. Their modelling has triggered spectacular developments of out-of-equilibrium…
Systems of classical continuous particles in the grand canonical ensemble interacting through purely attractive, yet stable, interactions are defined. By a lattice approximation, FKG ferromagnetic inequalities are shown to hold for such…