Related papers: Novel physics arising from phase transitions in bi…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The transformation of a system from one state to another is often mediated by a bottleneck in the system's phase space. In chemistry these bottlenecks are known as \emph{transition states} through which the system has to pass in order to…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
Self-propulsion allows living systems to display unusual collective behavior. Unlike passive systems in thermal equilibrium, active matter systems are not constrained by conventional thermodynamic laws. A question arises however as to what…
A single mechanism, endemic to the standard model of physics, is proposed to explain wavefunction collapse, classical motion, dissipation, equilibration, and the transition from pure quantum mechanics through open system decoherence to the…
Dynamics is central to living systems. In the last two decades, experiments have revealed that the dynamics in diverse biological systems - from intracellular cytoplasm to cellular and organismal aggregates - are remarkably similar to that…
Phase transitions are a fundamental concept in science describing diverse phenomena ranging from, e.g., the freezing of water to Bose-Einstein condensation. While the concept is well-established in equilibrium, similarly fundamental…
At low temperature a thermodynamic system undergoes a phase transition when a physical parameter passes through a singularity point of the free energy, corresponding to formation of a new order. At high temperature the thermal fluctuations…
We discover a new type of nonequilibrium phase transition in a model of chromatin dynamics, which accounts for the coherent motions that have been observed in experiment. The coherent motion is due to the long-range cooperation of molecular…
The phenomenon of universality is one of the most striking in many-body physics. Despite having sometimes wildly different microscopic constituents, systems can nonetheless behave in precisely the same way, with only the variable names…
Quantum phase transitions occur at zero temperature when some non-thermal control-parameter like pressure or chemical composition is changed. They are driven by quantum rather than thermal fluctuations. In this review we first give a…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
Using an activation mechanism reproducing facilitation, a dynamic phase transition triggered by a few active molecules was recently found in a supercooled model liquid. Prompted by this finding we investigate the presence of a similar…
The work is presented, leading to the universal contact molecular mechanism of phase transitions and other reactions in solid state. The two components of the mechanism - nucleation and interface propagation - are investigated in detail and…
We introduce a novel type of abnormal agents that proceed in the opposite direction of that defined for the normal agents. A new order parameter, $y$, is introduced to describe the characteristic of the system. Many interesting phenomenons…
A simple model with a novel type of dynamics is introduced in order to investigate the emergence of self-ordered motion in systems of particles with biologically motivated interaction. In our model particles are driven with a constant…
We numerically study the jamming transition in particulate systems with attraction by investigating their mechanical response at zero temperature. We find three regimes of mechanical behavior separated by two critical…
Dynamical symmetries are of considerable importance in elucidating the complex behaviour of strongly interacting systems with many degrees of freedom. Paradigmatic examples are cooperative phenomena as they arise in phase transitions, where…