Related papers: Scale-dependent irreversibility in living matter
Many materials, processes, and structures in science and engineering have important features at multiple scales of time and/or space; examples include biological tissues, active matter, oceans, networks, and images. Explicitly extracting,…
Molecular diffusion measurements are widely used to probe microstructure in materials and living organisms noninvasively. The precise relation of diffusion metrics to microstructure remains a major challenge: In complex samples, it is often…
Quantifying the irreversibility and dissipation of non-equilibrium processes is crucial to understanding their behavior, assessing their possible capabilities, and characterizing their efficiency. We introduce a physical quantity that…
From flocks of birds to biomolecular assemblies, systems in which many individual components independently consume energy to perform mechanical work exhibit a wide array of striking behaviors. Methods to quantify the dynamics of these so…
Living and non-living active matter consumes energy at the microscopic scale to drive emergent, macroscopic behavior including traveling waves and coherent oscillations. Recent work has characterized non-equilibrium systems by their total…
The geometrical structure is among the most fundamental ingredients in understanding complex systems. Is there any systematic approach in defining structures quantitatively, rather than illustratively? If yes, what are the basic principles…
We examine stochastic processes that are used to model nonequilibrium processes (e.g, pulling RNA or dragging colloids) and so deliberately violate detailed balance. We argue that by combining an information-theoretic measure of…
This topic review communicates working experiences regarding interaction of a multiplicity of processes. Our experiences come from climate change modelling, materials science, cell physiology and public health, and macroeconomic modelling.…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics provides a robust framework for characterizing phase transitions in systems whose microsopic dynamics are time-reversible. Efforts to develop and validate theoretical frameworks for time-irreversible,…
The dynamics of time-reversible systems are statistically indistinguishable when observed forward or backward in time. A rich literature of statistical methods to distinguish irreversible dynamics from the reversible dynamics of linear,…
A number of micro-scale biological flows are characterized by spatio-temporal chaos. These include dense suspensions of swimming bacteria, microtubule bundles driven by motor proteins, and dividing and migrating confluent layers of cells. A…
We obtain macroscopic adiabatic thermodynamic transformations by space-time scalings of a microscopic Hamiltonian dynamics subject to random collisions with the environment. The microscopic dynamics is given by a chain of oscillators…
Thermodynamic inference from coarse observations remains a key challenge. Memory, in particular correlations between consecutively observed mesostates, blur signatures of irreversibility and must be accounted for in defining physical…
Cellular cortex, which is a highly viscous thin cytoplasmic layer just below the cell membrane, controls the cell's mechanical properties, which can be characterized by a hydrodynamic length scale $\ell$. Cells actively regulate $\ell$ via…
Time-reversal symmetry breaking and entropy production are universal features of nonequilibrium phenomena. Despite its importance in the physics of active and living systems, the entropy production of systems with many degrees of freedom…
Time irreversibility, which characterizes nonequilibrium processes, can be measured based on the probabilistic differences between symmetric vectors. To simplify the quantification of time irreversibility, symmetric permutations instead of…
We measure different contributions to entropy production in a living functional epithelial tissue. We do this by extracting the functional dynamics of development while at the same time quantifying fluctuations. Using the translucent…
Temporal irreversibility, often referred to as the arrow of time, is a fundamental concept in statistical mechanics. Markers of irreversibility also provide a powerful characterisation of information processing in biological systems.…
A broken time-reversal symmetry, i.e. broken detailed balance, is central to non-equilibrium physics and is a prerequisite for life. However, it turns out to be quite challenging to unambiguously define and quantify time-reversal symmetry…
In setting up a stochastic description of the time evolution of a financial index, the challenge consists in devising a model compatible with all stylized facts emerging from the analysis of financial time series and providing a reliable…