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Statistical physics and thermodynamics provide a framework for relating the behaviour of microscopic particles to the macroscopic properties of a system. Thermodynamics casts these macroscopic, or observable, properties in terms of variables that are subject to constraints imposed by the four laws of thermodynamics, which can be explained by statistical physics.
Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.
Educational environment is known to influence learning efficiency of students, however qualitative analysis of this effect has open questions. The authors propose a model to quantify roommate peer effects based on student accommodation distribution and their academic performance.
Understanding the decentralized self-organization in animal groups helps design swarm robotics, yet the underlying mechanism remains elusive. Xiao et al. analyze collective motions of three large bird-flocking datasets and translate their findings to guide evacuation of a swarm of miniature robots in confinement.
Network memory impacts dynamical processes emerging in real-world social systems, however little is known about memory of temporal networks beyond pairwise interactions. The authors develop a framework to characterize the temporal organization of higher-order networks and propose a model of temporal hypergraphs with higher-order memory to reproduce the patterns emerging in real-world complex systems.
Spiral waves of cell density can form and propagate through bacterial biofilms. These waves are formed by a self-organization process that coordinates pulling forces between neighbouring cells.
Can many-body systems be beneficial to designing quantum technologies? We address this question by examining quantum engines, where recent studies indicate potential benefits through the harnessing of many-body effects, such as divergences close to phase transitions. However, open questions remain regarding their real-world applications.
During extreme storms, the failure of a small fraction of transmission lines can trigger a cascade of outages in a power grid. Going beyond static approaches, it is now demonstrated that resolving the spatio-temporal interactions between the storm and the power grid is key to identifying these critical lines.
Stable regions in four-dimensional phase space have been observed by following the motion of accelerated proton beams subject to nonlinear forces. This provides insights into the physics of dynamical systems and may lead to improved accelerator designs.
Ageing is a non-linear, irreversible process that defines many properties of glassy materials. Now, it is shown that the so-called material-time formalism can describe ageing in terms of equilibrium-like properties.