Related papers: Field-control, phase-transitions, and life's emerg…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
We give a new explanation for why some biological systems can stay quantum coherent for long times at room temperatures, one of the fundamental puzzles of quantum biology. We show that systems with the right level of complexity between…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
Non-reciprocal interactions between microscopic constituents can profoundly shape the large-scale properties of complex systems. Here, we investigate the effects of non-reciprocity in the context of theoretical ecology by analyzing a…
The control of complex systems is an ongoing challenge of complexity research. Recent advances using concepts of structural control deduce a wide range of control related properties from the network representation of complex systems. Here,…
We have studied the collective behavior of a population of integrate-and-fire oscillators. We show that diversity, introduced in terms of a random distribution of natural periods, is the mechanism that permits to observe self-organized…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
Explaining the emergence of self-organized biodiversity and species abundance distribution patterns remians a fundamental challenge in ecology. While classical frameworks, such as neutral theory and models based on pairwise species…
Certain systems with slow driving and avalanche-like dissipation events are naturally close to a critical point when the ratio of two energy scales is large. The first energy scale is the threshold above which an avalanche is triggered, the…
Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…
Rare events such as conformational changes in biomolecules, phase transitions, and chemical reactions are central to the behavior of many physical systems, yet they are extremely difficult to study computationally because unbiased…
A new model ecosystem consisting of many interacting species is introduced. The species are connected through a random matrix with a given connectivity. It is shown that the system is organized close to a boundary of marginal stability in…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
Cells with the same genome can exist in different phenotypes. and can change between distinct phenotypes when subject to specific stimuli and microenvironments. Some examples include cell differentiation during development, reprogramming…
A simple periodically driven system displaying rich behavior is introduced and studied. The system self-organizes into a mosaic of static ordered regions with three possible patterns, which are threaded by one-dimensional paths on which a…
Traditional percolation theory assumes static microscopic rules, limiting its ability to describe real-world complex systems where macroscopic order actively regulates local interactions. Here, we introduce feedback percolation, an unified…
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…
Focusing on a two-field Swift-Hohenberg model with linear nonreciprocal interactions, this study investigates how emerging higher-codimension points act as organizing centers for the nonequilibrium phase diagram that features various steady…
Complex spatial patterns in biological systems often arise through self-organization without a central coordination, guided by local interactions and chemical signaling. In this study, we explore how motility-dependent chemical deposition…
We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…