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Catastrophic transitions, where a system shifts abruptly between alternate steady states, are a generic feature of many nonlinear systems. Recently these regime shift were suggested as the mechanism underlies many ecological catastrophes,…
Discrete quantum walks are dynamical protocols for controlling a single quantum particle. Despite of its simplicity, quantum walks display rich topological phenomena and provide one of the simplest systems to study and understand…
Friction, the resistive force between two surfaces sliding past each other, is at the core of a wide diversity of locomotion schemes. While such schemes are somewhat understood for homogeneous environments, locomotion based on friction in…
Symmetries represent a fundamental constraint for physical systems and relevant new phenomena often emerge as a consequence of their breaking. An important example is provided by space- and time-translational invariance in statistical…
We describe a simple mechanical system that involves Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. The system consists of two beads constrained to slide along a hoop and attached each other through a spring. When the hoop rotates about a fixed axis, the…
Particle transport in complex environments such as the interior of living cells is often (transiently) non-Fickian or anomalous, that is, it deviates from the laws of Brownian motion. Such anomalies may be the result of small-scale…
A snap-through bifurcation occurs when a bistable structure loses one of its stable states and moves rapidly to the remaining state. For example, a buckled arch with symmetrically clamped ends can snap between an inverted and a natural…
The slow-to-start mechanism is known to play an important role in the particular shape of the Fundamental diagram of traffic and to be associated to hysteresis effects of traffic flow.We study this question in the context of exclusion and…
The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human mobility are now available and many interesting features have been discovered,…
The common perception is that strong coupling to the environment will always render the evolution of the system density matrix quasi-classical (in fact, diffusive) in the long time limit. We present here a counter-example, in which a…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
We consider the rich variety of collective motion patterns emerging when aligning active particles move in the presence of randomly distributed obstacles - representing quenched noise in two dimensions. In order to get insight into the…
We discuss the origin of topological defects in phase transitions and analyze their role as a "diagnostic tool" in the study of the non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking. Homogeneous second order phase transitions are the focus of…
Density-matrix topology, defined through the geometric property of the relevant modular Hamiltonian, can undergo transitions in the corresponding open-system dynamics. While symmetry considerations are crucial to ensure such a dynamic…
We study slow dynamics of particles moving in a matrix of immobile obstacles using molecular dynamics simulations. The glass transition point decreases drastically as the obstacle density increases. At higher obstacle densities, the…
Subdiffusive motion of tracer particles in complex crowded environments, such as biological cells, has been shown to be widepsread. This deviation from brownian motion is usually characterized by a sublinear time dependence of the mean…
Pedestrian routing choices play a crucial role in shaping collective crowd dynamics, yet the influence of interactions among unfamiliar individuals remains poorly understood. In this study, we analyze real-world pedestrian behavior at a…
A simple model for the nonlinear collective transport of interacting particles in a random medium with strong disorder is introduced and analyzed. A finite threshold for the driving force divides the behavior into two regimes characterized…
Random walks and related spatial stochastic models have been used in a range of application areas including animal and plant ecology, infectious disease epidemiology, developmental biology, wound healing, and oncology. Classical random walk…
Dynamical symmetry breaking in an expanding nuclear system is investigated in semi-classical and quantum framework by employing a collective transport model which is constructed to mimic the collective behavior of expanding systems. It is…