Force generated by actin polymerization is essential in cell motility and the locomotion of organelles or bacteria such as Listeria monocytogenes. Both in vivo and in vitro experiments on actin-based motility have observed geometrical trajectories including straight lines, circles, S-shaped curves, and translating figure eights. This paper reports a phenomenological model of an actin-propelled disk in two dimensions that generates geometrical trajectories. Our model shows that when the evolutions of actin density and force per filament on the disk are strongly coupled to the disk self-rotation, it is possible for a straight trajectory to lose its stability. When the instability is due to a pitchfork bifurcation, the resulting trajectory is a circle; a straight trajectory can also lose stability through a Hopf bifurcation, and the resulting trajectory is an S-shaped curve. We also show that a half-coated disk, which mimics the distribution of functionalized proteins in Listeria, also undergoes similar symmetry-breaking bifurcations when the straight trajectory loses stability. For both a fully coated disk and a half-coated disk, when the trajectory is an S-shaped curve, the angular frequency of the disk self-rotation is different from that of the disk trajectory. However, for circular trajectories, these angular frequencies are different for a fully coated disk but the same for a half-coated disk.

The minimal integrate-and-fire-or-burst neuron model succinctly describes both tonic firing and postinhibitory rebound bursting of thalamocortical cells in the sensory relay. Networks of integrate-and-fire-or-burst (IFB) neurons with slow inhibitory synaptic interactions have been shown to support stable rhythmic states, including globally synchronous and cluster oscillations, in which network-mediated inhibition cyclically generates bursting in coherent subgroups of neurons. In this paper, we introduce a reduced IFB neuronal population model to study synchronization of inhibition-mediated oscillatory bursting states to periodic excitatory input. Using numeric methods, we demonstrate the existence and stability of 1:1 phase-locked bursting oscillations in the sinusoidally forced IFB neuronal population model. Phase locking is shown to arise when periodic excitation is sufficient to pace the onset of bursting in an IFB cluster without counteracting the inhibitory interactions necessary for burst generation. Phase-locked bursting states are thus found to destabilize when periodic excitation increases in strength or frequency. Further study of the IFB neuronal population model with pulse-like periodic excitatory input illustrates that this synchronization mechanism generalizes to a broad range of n:m phase-locked bursting states across both globally synchronous and clustered oscillatory regimes.

Based on the theory of asymptotic analysis, we prove that the viscous stress tensor computed with the lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) in a two-dimensional domain is indeed second-order accurate in space. We only consider simple bounce-back boundary conditions which can be reduced to the periodic boundary conditions by using the method of image. While the LBE with nine velocities on two-dimensional square lattice (i.e., the D2Q9 model) and with the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook collision model is used as an example in this work, our proof can be extended to the LBE with any linear relaxation collision models in both two and three dimensions.

In this work we study the behavior of classical two-person, two-strategies evolutionary games on networks embedded in a Euclidean two-dimensional space with different kinds of degree distributions and topologies going from regular to random and to scale-free ones. Using several imitative microscopic dynamics, we study the evolution of global cooperation on the above network classes and find that specific topologies having a hierarchical structure and an inhomogeneous degree distribution, such as Apollonian and grid-based networks, are very conducive to cooperation. Spatial scale-free networks are still good for cooperation but to a lesser degree. Both classes of networks enhance average cooperation in all games with respect to standard random geometric graphs and regular grids by shifting the boundaries between cooperative and defective regions. These findings might be useful in the design of interaction structures that maintain cooperation when the agents are constrained to live in physical two-dimensional space.

We investigate changes in several features of the stability diagram of an optically injected single mode laser as the ratio of the photon lifetime to the carrier lifetime is progressively increased from very low values to very high values. In particular we consider the creation of a region of phase-locked bistability, changes in the nature of codimension-2 bifurcation points, and the presence or otherwise of chaos in the system. We show that many of the features associated with high values of the aforementioned ratio also emerge for very low pump currents regardless of the ratio of the lifetimes.

We present numerical simulations of the kinematic induction equation in order to examine the dynamo efficiency of an axisymmetric von Kármán–like flow subject to time-dependent nonaxisymmetric velocity perturbations. The numerical model is based on the setup of the French von Kármán-sodium dynamo (VKS) and on the flow measurements from a water experiment conducted at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. The principal experimental observations that are modeled in our simulations are nonaxisymmetric vortexlike structures which perform an azimuthal drift motion in the equatorial plane. Our simulations show that the interactions of these periodic flow perturbations with the fundamental drift of the magnetic eigenmode (including the special case of nondrifting fields) essentially determine the temporal behavior of the dynamo state. We find two distinct regimes of dynamo action that depend on the (prescribed) drift frequency of an ($m=2$) vortexlike flow perturbation. For comparatively slowly drifting vortices we observe a narrow window with enhanced growth rates and a drift of the magnetic eigenmode that is synchronized with the perturbation drift. The resonance-like enhancement of the growth rates takes place when the vortex drift frequency roughly equals the drift frequency of the magnetic eigenmode in the unperturbed system. Outside of this small window, the field generation is hampered compared to the unperturbed case, and the field amplitude of the magnetic eigenmode is modulated with approximately twice the vortex drift frequency. The abrupt transition between the resonant regime and the modulated regime is identified as a spectral exceptional point where eigenvalues (growth rates and frequencies) and eigenfunctions of two previously independent modes collapse. In the actual configuration the drift frequencies of the velocity perturbations that are observed in the water experiment are much larger than the fundamental drift frequency of the magnetic eigenmode that is obtained from our numerical simulations. Hence, we conclude that the fulfillment of the resonance condition might be unlikely in present day dynamo experiments. However, a possibility to increase the dynamo efficiency in the VKS experiment might be realized by an application of holes or fingers on the outer boundary in the equatorial plane. These mechanical distortions provoke an anchorage of the vortices at fixed positions thus allowing an adjustment of the temporal behavior of the nonaxisymmetric flow perturbations.

We present a phase field model for isothermal transformations of two-component alloys that includes Onsager kinetic cross coupling between the nonconserved phase field $\varphi$ and the conserved concentration field $C$. We also provide the reduction of the phase field model to the corresponding macroscopic description of the free boundary problem. The reduction is given in a general form. Additionally we use an explicit example of a phase field model and check that the reduced macroscopic description, in the range of its applicability, is in excellent agreement with direct phase field simulations. The relevance of the newly introduced terms to solute trapping is also discussed.

The critical indices ${\alpha }^{\prime }$, $\beta$, ${\gamma }^{\prime }$, and $\delta$ of the Quark Gluon Bags with Surface Tension Model that has a critical endpoint are calculated and compared with the exponents of other models. These indices are expressed in terms of the most general parameters of the model. Despite the usual expectations the found critical indices do not depend on the Fisher exponent $\tau$ and on the parameter $\varkappa$ which relates the mean bag surface to its volume. The scaling relations for the obtained critical exponents are verified, and it is demonstrated that for the standard definition of the index ${\alpha }^{\prime }$ the Fisher and the Griffiths scaling inequalities are not fulfilled in general case, whereas the Liberman scaling inequality is always obeyed. This is not surprising for the phase diagram with the asymmetric properties of pure phases, but the present model also provides us with the first and explicit example that the specially defined index ${\alpha }_s^{\prime }$ does not recover the scaling relations as well. Therefore, here we suggest the physically motivated definition of the index ${\alpha }^{\prime }={\alpha }_c^{\prime }$ and demonstrate that such a definition recovers the Fisher scaling inequality, while it is shown that the Griffiths inequality should be generalized for the phase diagram with the asymmetric properties. The critical exponents of several systems that belong to different universality classes are successfully described by the parameters of the present model, and hence its equation of state can be used for a variety of practical applications.

We studied the efficiency of two different schemes for a quantum heat engine, by considering a single Dirac particle trapped in an infinite one-dimensional potential well as the “working substance.” The first scheme is a cycle, composed of two adiabatic and two isoenergetic reversible trajectories in configuration space. The trajectories are driven by a quasistatic deformation of the potential well due to an external applied force. The second scheme is a variant of the former, where isoenergetic trajectories are replaced by isothermal ones, along which the system is in contact with macroscopic thermostats. This second scheme constitutes a quantum analog of the classical Carnot cycle. Our expressions, as obtained from the Dirac single-particle spectrum, converge in the nonrelativistic limit to some of the existing results in the literature for the Schrödinger spectrum.

In the present paper through a shear test on a fully saturated granular medium, simulated by the discrete element method, the effect of the heat produced by friction on the internal pore water pressure is explored. It is found that the dissipated energy is enough to increase the pore pressure and reduce the soil strength. In adiabatic and impermeable conditions the heat builds up quickly inside the shear band, and the softening is more pronounced. It is found as well that for real geological materials, heat conduction is not enough to reduce the pore pressure, and the softening prevails. Nevertheless, it is observed that the hydraulic conduction may mitigate or completely eliminate the temperature growth inside the shear band. This result provides new understanding on the thermodynamic factors involved in the onset of catastrophic landslides.

We report results from a computer simulation study on the rotational ratchet effect in systems of magnetic particles interacting via dipolar interactions. The ratchet effect consists of directed rotations of the particles in an oscillating magnetic field, which lacks a net rotating component. Our investigations are based on Brownian dynamics simulations of such many-particle systems. We investigate the influence of both the random and deterministic contributions to the equations of motion on the ratchet effect. As a main result, we show that dipolar interactions can have an enhancing as well as a dampening effect on the ratchet behavior depending on the dipolar coupling strength of the system under consideration. The enhancement is shown to be caused by an increase in the effective field on a particle generated by neighboring magnetic particles, while the dampening is due to restricted rotational motion in the effective field. Moreover, we find a nontrivial influence of the short-range, repulsive interaction between the particles.

Schierenberg et al. [Phys. Rev. E 85, 061130 (2012)] recently applied the Wigner surmise, i.e., substitution of $\infty \times \infty$ matrices by their $2\times 2$ counterparts for the computation of level spacing distributions, to random matrix ensembles in transition between two universality classes. I examine the accuracy and the range of validity of the surmise for the crossover between the Gaussian orthogonal and unitary ensembles by contrasting them with the large-$N$ results that I evaluated using the Nyström-type method for the Fredholm determinant. The surmised expression at the best-fitting parameter provides a good approximation for $0\lesssim s\lesssim 2$, i.e., the validity range of the original surmise.

We examine phase transitions between the “easy,” “hard,” and “unsolvable” phases when attempting to identify structure in large complex networks (“community detection”) in the presence of disorder induced by network “noise” (spurious links that obscure structure), heat bath temperature $T$, and system size $N$. The partition of a graph into $q$ optimally disjoint subgraphs or “communities” inherently requires Potts-type variables. In earlier work [Philos. Mag. 92, 406 (2012)], when examining power law and other networks (and general associated Potts models), we illustrated that transitions in the computational complexity of the community detection problem typically correspond to spin-glass-type transitions (and transitions to chaotic dynamics in mechanical analogs) at both high and low temperatures and/or noise. The computationally “hard” phase exhibits spin-glass type behavior including memory effects. The region over which the hard phase extends in the noise and temperature phase diagram decreases as $N$ increases while holding the average number of nodes per community fixed. This suggests that in the thermodynamic limit a direct sharp transition may occur between the easy and unsolvable phases. When present, transitions at low temperature or low noise correspond to entropy driven (or “order by disorder”) annealing effects, wherein stability may initially increase as temperature or noise is increased before becoming unsolvable at sufficiently high temperature or noise. Additional transitions between contending viable solutions (such as those at different natural scales) are also possible. Identifying community structure via a dynamical approach where “chaotic-type” transitions were found earlier. The correspondence between the spin-glass-type complexity transitions and transitions into chaos in dynamical analogs might extend to other hard computational problems. In this work, we examine large networks (with a power law distribution in cluster size) that have a large number of communities ($q\gg 1$). We infer that large systems at a constant ratio of $q$ to the number of nodes $N$ asymptotically tend towards insolvability in the limit of large $N$ for any positive $T$. The asymptotic behavior of temperatures below which structure identification might be possible, $T_{\times }=O[1/\ln q]$, decreases slowly, so for practical system sizes, there remains an accessible, and generally easy, global solvable phase at low temperature. We further employ multivariate Tutte polynomials to show that increasing $q$ emulates increasing $T$ for a general Potts model, leading to a similar stability region at low $T$. Given the relation between Tutte and Jones polynomials, our results further suggest a link between the above complexity transitions and transitions associated with random knots.

We present a generalized nonlinear theory for large-amplitude electrostatic (ES) ion shocks in collisional quantum plasmas composed of mildly coupled degenerate electron fluid of arbitrary degeneracy and nondegenerate strongly correlated ion fluid with arbitrary atomic number. For our purposes, we use the inertialess electron momentum equation including the electrostatic force, pressure gradient, and relevant quantum forces, as well as a generalized viscoelastic ion momentum (GVIM) equation for strongly correlated nondegenerate ions. The ion continuity equation, in the quasineutral approximation, then closes our nonlinear system of equations. When the electric field force is eliminated from the GVIM equation by using the inertialess electron momentum equation, we then obtain a GVIM and ion continuity equations, which exhibit nonlinear couplings between the ion number density and the ion fluid velocity. The pair of nonlinear equations is numerically solved to study the dynamics of arbitrarily-large-amplitude planar and nonplanar ES shocks arising from a balance between harmonic generation nonlinearities and the ion fluid viscosity for a wide range of plasma mass densities and ion atomic numbers that are relevant for the cores of giant planets (viz., Jupiter) and compact stars (viz., white dwarfs). Our numerical results reveal that the ES shock density profiles strongly depend on the plasma number density and composition (the atomic-number) parameters. Furthermore, ion density perturbations propagate with Mach numbers which significantly depend on the studied plasma fractional parameters. It is concluded that the dynamics of the ES shocks in the superdense degenerate plasma is quite different in the core of a white dwarf star from that in the lower density crust region.

We compute thermodynamical properties of a low-density hydrogen gas within the physical picture, in which the system is described as a quantum electron-proton plasma interacting via the Coulomb potential. Our calculations are done using the exact scaled low-temperature (SLT) expansion, which provides a rigorous extension of the well-known virial expansion—valid in the fully ionized phase—into the Saha regime where the system is partially or fully recombined into hydrogen atoms. After recalling the SLT expansion of the pressure [A. Alastuey et al., J. Stat. Phys. 130, 1119 (2008)], we obtain the SLT expansions of the chemical potential and of the internal energy, up to order $\exp (-|E_{\mathrm{H}}|/kT)$ included ($E_{\mathrm{H}}\simeq -13.6$ eV). Those truncated expansions describe the first five nonideal corrections to the ideal Saha law. They account exactly, up to the considered order, for all effects of interactions and thermal excitations, including the formation of bound states (atom $\mathrm{H}$, ions ${\mathrm{H}}^{-}$ and ${{\mathrm{H}}_2}^{+}$, molecule ${\mathrm{H}}_2,\cdots$) and atom-charge and atom-atom interactions. Among the five leading corrections, three are easy to evaluate, while the remaining ones involve well-defined internal partition functions for the molecule H${}_2$ and ions H${}^{-}$ and H${}_2$${}^{+}$, for which no closed-form analytical formula exist currently. We provide accurate low-temperature approximations for those partition functions by using known values of rotational and vibrational energies. We compare then the predictions of the SLT expansion, for the pressure and the internal energy, with, on the one hand, the equation-of-state tables obtained within the opacity program at Livermore (OPAL) and, on the other hand, data of path integral quantum Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations. In general, a good agreement is found. At low densities, the simple analytical SLT formulas reproduce the values of the OPAL tables up to the last digit in a large range of temperatures, while at higher densities ($\rho \sim {10}^{-2}$ g/cm${}^3$), some discrepancies among the SLT, OPAL, and PIMC results are observed.

Measurements of the velocity space distribution in a weakly coupled dusty plasma are modeled with both the spherically symmetric Maxwellian probability distribution function and the ellipsoidally symmetric trinormal probability distribution function. The effectiveness of the two models is compared quantitatively using an application of Bayesian probability theory which shows that the anisotropy included in the trinormal model provides a much improved description of the system.

A Bayesian data-analysis approach to data sets of maximum undercooling temperatures recorded in repeated melting-cooling cycles of high-purity samples is proposed. The crystallization phenomenon is described in terms of a nonhomogeneous Poisson process driven by a temperature-dependent sample nucleation rate $J\left(T\right)$. The method was extensively tested by computer simulations and applied to real data for undercooled liquid Ge. It proved to be particularly useful in the case of scarce data sets where the usage of binned data would degrade the available experimental information.

Specific heats of quantum systems with symmetric and asymmetric double-well potentials have been calculated. In numerical calculations of their specific heats, we have adopted the combined method, which takes into account not only eigenvalues of ${\epsilon }_n$ for $0\le n\le N_m$ obtained by the energy-matrix diagonalization but also their extrapolated ones for $N_m+1\le n<\infty$ ($N_m=20$ or 30). Calculated specific heats are shown to be rather different from counterparts of a harmonic oscillator. In particular, specific heats of symmetric double-well systems at very low temperatures have the Schottky-type anomaly, which is rooted to a small energy gap in low-lying two-level eigenstates induced by a tunneling through the potential barrier. The Schottky-type anomaly is removed when an asymmetry is introduced into the double-well potential. It has been pointed out that the specific-heat calculation of a double-well system reported by Feranchuk, Ulyanenkov, and Kuz'min [Chem. Phys. 157, 61 (1991)] is misleading because the zeroth-order operator method they adopted neglects crucially important off-diagonal contributions.

Lévy flights can be described using a Fokker-Planck equation, which involves a fractional derivative operator in the position coordinate. Such an operator has its natural expression in the Fourier domain. Starting with this, we show that the solution of the equation can be written as a Hamiltonian path integral. Though this has been realized in the literature, the method has not found applications as the path integral appears difficult to evaluate. We show that a method in which one integrates over the position coordinates first, after which integration is performed over the momentum coordinates, can be used to evaluate several path integrals that are of interest. Using this, we evaluate the propagators for (a) free particle, (b) particle subjected to a linear potential, and (c) harmonic potential. In all the three cases, we have obtained results for both overdamped and underdamped cases.

The recently developed feedback trap can be used to create arbitrary virtual potentials, to explore the dynamics of small particles or large molecules in complex situations. Experimentally, feedback traps introduce several finite time scales: There is a delay between the measurement of a particle's position and the feedback response, the feedback response is applied for a finite update time, and a finite camera exposure integrates motion. We show how to incorporate such timing effects into the description of particle motion. For the test case of a virtual quadratic potential, we give the first accurate description of particle dynamics, calculating the power spectrum and variance of fluctuations as a function of feedback gain, testing against simulations. We show that for small feedback gains, the motion approximates that of a particle in an ordinary harmonic potential. Moreover, if the potential is varied in time, for example by varying its stiffness, the work that is calculated approximates that done in an ordinary changing potential. The quality of the approximation is set by the ratio of the update time of the feedback loop to the relaxation time of motion in the virtual potential.