We experimentally study the unjamming dynamics of strongly compressed particle rafts confined between two fixed walls and two movable barriers. The back barrier is made of an elastic band, whose deflection indicates the local stress. The front barrier is pierced by a gate, whose opening triggers local unjamming. Prior to gate opening, the rafts are quasistatically compressed by moving only one of the two barriers, in the vicinity of which folds form. Using high-speed imaging, we follow the raft relaxation with folded, jammed, and unjammed areas and measure the velocity fields inside and outside the confined domain. Two very different behaviors develop. For rafts compressed by the back barrier, only partial unjamming occurs. At the end of the process, many folds remain and the back stress does not relax. The flow develops mostly along the compression axis and the particles passing the gate form a dense raft whose width is the gate width. For rafts compressed at the front, quasitotal unjamming is observed. Almost no folds persist and only minimal stress remains, if any. The particles flow along the compression axis but also normally to it and form a rather circular and not dense assembly. Both the force chain network orientation and the initial fold location could cause the unjamming difference. Other effects, such as a different pressure field or simple steric hindrance, cannot be excluded.

Thermocapillary convection is a common flow in space. Experiments regarding thermocapillary convection were previously carried out in a large-scale liquid bridge with a diameter of 20 mm on the Tiangong-2 space station, and the transition process to chaos was systematically studied. Under microgravity conditions, gravity is greatly weakened, and the transition process of the flow is very slow. This allows for the opportunity to study the bifurcation process in detail. It has been found that there are abundant nonlinear physical phenomena associated with the changing geometric parameters in thermocapillary convection systems. The transition mechanisms interact with each other, leading to various transition routes. The phase space trajectories, the Lyapunov exponents, and correlation dimensions are calculated to distinguish the chaotic state under a variety of conditions. Through the chaotic dynamics analysis, the chaotic characteristics of the entire transition process are quantitatively discussed.

The engineering features of transmitting mediums and their impact on different characteristics of a quantum system play a significant role in the efficient performance of nonlocal protocols. For this purpose, the dynamics of open quantum systems and coupling mediums remain a pathway. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of quantum correlations using negativity, uncertainty-induced nonlocality, and local quantum Fisher information in a hybrid qubit-qutrit thermal state when coupled with a magnetic field and influenced by random telegraph noise. Different features of the system parameters are taken into account while designing longer preservation of qubit-qutrit correlations. We show that the temperature has an inverse impact on the initial values of negativity, uncertainty-induced nonlocality, and local quantum Fisher information. When the magnetic field is characterized by different features, the entanglement, nonlocality, and Fisher information show a variety of dynamical maps, assuring their distinct nature. In addition, the qubit-qutrit correlations undergo repeated revivals when the configuration is restricted to the non-Markovian regime. On the other hand, an exponential drop with a single minimum is observed in the Markovian regime of the coupled field. Most importantly, our findings reveal that the present coupled fields have several advantages that can be leveraged to generate the optimal degree of entanglement, nonlocality, and local quantum Fisher information preservation in quantum dynamical maps.

We have studied the critical properties of the three-dimensional random anisotropy Heisenberg model by means of numerical simulations using the Parallel Tempering method. We have simulated the model with two different disorder distributions, cubic and isotropic ones, with two different anisotropy strengths for each disorder class. For the case of the anisotropic disorder, we have found evidence of universality by finding critical exponents and universal dimensionless ratios independent of the strength of the disorder. In the case of isotropic disorder distribution the situation is very involved: we have found two phase transitions in the magnetization channel which are merging for larger lattices remaining a zero magnetization low-temperature phase. Studying this region using a spin-glass order parameter we have found evidence for a spin-glass phase transition. We have estimated effective critical exponents for the spin-glass phase transition for the different values of the strength of the isotropic disorder, discussing the crossover regime.

We investigate the dependence on the search space dimension of statistical properties of random searches with Lévy $\alpha$-stable and power-law distributions of step lengths. We find that the probabilities to return to the last target found $\left(P_0\right)$ and to encounter faraway targets $\left(P_L\right)$, as well as the associated Shannon entropy $S$, behave as a function of $\alpha$ quite differently in one (1D) and two (2D) dimensions, a somewhat surprising result not reported until now. While in 1D one always has $P_0\ge P_L$, an interesting crossover takes place in 2D that separates the search regimes with $P_0>P_L$ for higher $\alpha$ and $P_0<P_L$ for lower $\alpha$, depending on the initial distance to the last target found. We also obtain in 2D a maximum in the entropy $S$ for $\alpha \in (0,2]$, not observed in 1D apart from the trivial $\alpha \to 0$ ballistic limit. Improving the understanding of the role of dimensionality in random searches is relevant in diverse contexts, as in the problem of encounter rates in biology and ecology.

We introduce and analytically and numerically study a simple model of interagent competition, where underachievement is strongly discouraged. We consider $N\gg 1$ particles performing independent Brownian motions on the line. Two particles are selected at random and at random times, and the particle closest to the origin is reset to it. We show that, in the limit of $N\to \infty$, the dynamics of the coarse-grained particle density field can be described by a nonlocal hydrodynamic theory which was encountered in a study of the spatial extent of epidemics in a critical regime. The hydrodynamic theory predicts relaxation of the system toward a stationary density profile of the “swarm” of particles, which exhibits a power-law decay at large distances. An interesting feature of this relaxation is a nonstationary “halo” around the stationary solution, which continues to expand in a self-similar manner. The expansion is ultimately arrested by finite-$N$ effects at a distance of order $\sqrt{N}$ from the origin, which gives an estimate of the average radius of the swarm. The hydrodynamic theory does not capture the behavior of the particle farthest from the origin—the current leader. We suggest a simple scenario for typical fluctuations of the leader's distance from the origin and show that the mean distance continues to grow indefinitely as $\sqrt{t}$. Finally, we extend the inter-agent competition from $n=2$ to an arbitrary number $n$ of competing Brownian particles ($n\ll N$). Our analytical predictions are supported by Monte Carlo simulations.

We study the scenario in which traveling pulses emerge in a prototypical type-I one-dimensional excitable medium, which exhibits two different routes to excitable behavior, mediated by a homoclinic (saddle-loop) and a saddle-node on the invariant cycle bifurcations. We characterize the region in parameter space in which traveling pulses are stable together with the different bifurcations behind either their destruction or loss of stability. In particular, some of the bifurcations delimiting the stability region have been connected, using singular limits, with the two different scenarios that mediated type-I local excitability. Finally, the existence of traveling pulses has been linked to a drift pitchfork instability of localized steady structures.

Bacterial growth and division generally occur by the process known as binary fission, in which the cells grow polarly until they divide into two daughter cells. Although this process is affected by factors that introduce stochastic variability in both growth rate and daughter cell length, the fact is that the size distribution in growing bacteria remains stable over time. This suggests the existence of homeostatic mechanisms that contribute to maintaining a stable size distribution. Those known as sizer and adder stand out among these mechanisms whose relevance is not entirely determined. In this work, computer simulations using an agent-based model are used to study the effect of these homeostatic mechanisms on the geometrical and structural properties of the developing microcolonies, focusing on the early stages of its development. Also, we examine the effect of linear or exponential dependence with the time of cellular growth on these properties. From our study, we deduce that these mechanisms do not have a noticeable impact on the properties studied, which could be due to the importance that stochastic factors play in the cell division and growth process. In addition, we discuss how competition between cell growth and diffusion is a key aspect in explaining the structure and geometry of developing bacterial microcolonies. The results of the study will help to clarify which processes and parameters should be considered relevant when designing simulation models.

The mechanics of biological tissues mainly proceeds from the cell cortex rheology. A direct, explicit link between cortex rheology and tissue rheology remains lacking, yet would be instrumental in understanding how modulations of cortical mechanics may impact tissue mechanical behavior. Using an ordered geometry built on 3D hexagonal, incompressible cells, we build a mapping relating the cortical rheology to the monolayer tissue rheology. Our approach shows that the tissue low-frequency elastic modulus is proportional to the rest tension of the cortex, as expected from the physics of liquid foams as well as of tensegrity structures. A fractional visco-contractile cortex rheology is predicted to yield a high-frequency fractional visco-elastic monolayer rheology, where such a fractional behavior has been recently observed experimentally at each scale separately. In particular cases, the mapping may be inverted, allowing to derive from a given tissue rheology the underlying cortex rheology. Interestingly, applying the same approach to a 2D hexagonal tiling fails, which suggests that the 2D character of planar cell cortex-based models may be unsuitable to account for realistic monolayer rheologies. We provide quantitative predictions, amenable to experimental tests through standard perturbation assays of cortex constituents, and hope to foster new, challenging mechanical experiments on cell monolayers.

We calculate the configurational entropy of colloidal particles in a confined geometry interacting as hard disks using Monte Carlo integration. In particular, we consider systems with three kinds of boundary conditions: hard, periodic, and spherical. For small to moderate packing fraction $\varphi$ values, we find the entropies per particle for systems with the periodic and the spherical boundary conditions tend to reach the same value with the increase of the particle number $N$, while that for the system with the hard boundary conditions still has obvious differences compared to them within the studied $N$ range. Surprisingly, despite the small system sizes, the estimated entropies per particle at infinite system size from extrapolations in the periodic and spherical systems are in reasonable agreement with that calculated using thermodynamic integration. Besides, as $N$ increases we find the pair correlation function begins to exhibit similar features as that of a thermally equilibrated hard-disk fluid at the same packing fraction. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of how the configurational entropy changes with the system size and the influence of boundary conditions, and provide insights relevant to engineering particles in confined spaces.

Microdroplets driven by the Marangoni effect are known to continue to swim for hours despite their simple composition. This swimming microdroplet changes its motion from straight to curvilinear and further to chaotic as the Péclet number increases. In this study, we investigate the effect of external perturbations on the three-dimensional axis-asymmetric model of a droplet driven by the Marangoni effect. The aim here is to elucidate the contribution of external perturbation to the complex motion of the droplet and the change in its effect according to the droplet size. In this paper, first we provide a detailed explanation on the derivation of the model introduced in our previous work, which is next used to describe the motion of the droplet in the numerical study of the angular response to random perturbations. The numerical simulation of droplet motion with different types of noise indicates that the model does not converge them into a certain type of motion but rather helps to reflect the external perturbations. The obtained results suggest that the types and properties of external perturbation have a considerable effect on the droplet motion.

The mechanical nonlinear response of dense Brownian suspensions of polymer gel particles is studied experimentally and by means of numerical simulations. It is shown that the response to the application of a constant shear rate depends on the previous history of the suspension. When the flow starts from a suspension at rest, it exhibits an elastic response followed by a stress overshoot and then a plastic flow regime. Conversely, after flow reversal, the stress overshoot does not occur, and the apparent elastic modulus is reduced while numerical simulations reveal that the anisotropy of the local microstructure is delayed relative to the macroscopic stress.

Rydberg atom arrays have recently emerged to be a promising platform for the exploration of exotic quantum phases of matter and quantum phenomena. In this work, we map out the ground-state phase diagram of Rydberg atoms on a honeycomb lattice as a function of the Rydberg blockade radius and the laser detuning by performing large-scale finite-size density matrix renormalization group simulations. Apart from a featureless disordered phase, we find five other intricate long-range density-wave-ordered phases within a relatively wide parameter space. The properties of these quantum phases are analyzed by calculating their Rydberg excitation profiles and static structure factors. In addition, a continuous quantum phase transition belonging to the $(2+1)$-dimensional Ising universality class is explored by a standard finite-size scaling analysis. Our work implies some different physics, such as the possible nontrivial quantum phase transitions and a highly degenerate string ordered phase, that a honeycomb geometry could bring to the Rydberg system and serves as a numerical guide for possible real experiments.

Flocking in $d=2$ is a genuine nonequilibrium phenomenon for which irreversibility is an essential ingredient. We study a class of minimal flocking models whose only source of irreversibility is self-propulsion and use the entropy production rate (EPR) to quantify the departure from equilibrium across their phase diagrams. The EPR is maximal in the vicinity of the order-disorder transition, where reshuffling of the interaction network is fast. We show that signatures of irreversibility come in the form of asymmetries in the steady-state distribution of the flock's microstates. These asymmetries occur as consequences of the time-reversal symmetry breaking in the considered self-propelled systems, independently of the interaction details. In the case of metric pairwise forces, they reduce to local asymmetries in the distribution of pairs of particles. This study suggests a possible use of pair asymmetries both to quantify the departure from equilibrium and to learn relevant information about aligning interaction potentials from data.

In this paper, we provide a mathematical description of the onset of instability for buoyancy-driven flow around a cone. The self-similar solutions of the basic flow are derived, where the ambient fluid and the cone have independent temperature gradients. The linear instability properties are investigated by utilizing the Chebyshev collocation method. It is demonstrated that the neutral curves have a two-lobed structure and that changing the Grashof number has only quantitative influence on stability. The critical streamwise location increases when the half-apex angle is increased, and the unstable range of the wave number diminishes. According to the examination of eigenfunction profiles and the progression of the two spatial branches in the $({\alpha }_i,{\alpha }_r)$ planes, the primary instabilities on the surface of cone are identified as type-I mode and type-II mode. The energy analysis is investigated for a typical situation to gain a physical insight, where it is demonstrated that besides the viscous dissipation, the streamline curvature and buoyancy-driven effects are dominant for the type-I mode while inviscid effect plays an essential role in type II. These encouraging results are expected to be conducive to understanding buoyancy-driven systems.

In this paper, we study the transport properties (percolation and conductivity) of a two-dimensional structure created by depositing dimers on a one-dimensional substrate where multilayer deposition is allowed. Specifically, we are interested in studying how the mentioned properties vary as a function of the height of the multilayer. The critical parameters of the percolation transition are calculated using finite-size scaling analysis, obtaining the scaling laws for the probability of percolation and the conductivity of the system. To calculate the electrical conductivity of the multilayer, we use the Frank-Lobb algorithm.

Personal income distribution may exhibit a two-class structure, such that the lower income class of the population (85–98%) is described by exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution, whereas the upper income class (2–15%) has a Pareto power-law distribution. We propose a method, based on a theoretical and numerical optimization scheme, which allows us to determine the crossover income between the distributions, the temperature of the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution, and the Pareto index. Using this method, the Brazilian income distribution data provided by the National Household Sample Survey was studied. The data was stratified into two dichotomies (sex/gender and color/race), so the model was tested using different subsets along with accessing the economic differences between these groups. Last, we analyze the temporal evolution of the parameters of our model and the Gini coefficient discussing the implication on the Brazilian income inequality. In this paper, we propose an optimization method to find a continuous two-class income distribution, which is able to delimit the boundaries of the two distributions. It also gives a measure of inequality which is a function that depends only on the Pareto index and the percentage of people in the high-income region. We found a temporal dynamics relation, that may be general, between the Pareto and the percentage of people described by the Pareto tail.

Understanding how the interplay between higher-order and multilayer structures of interconnections influences the synchronization behaviors of dynamical systems is a feasible problem of interest, with possible application in essential topics such as neuronal dynamics. Here, we provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the stability of the complete synchronization state in simplicial complexes with numerous interaction layers. We show that the synchronization state exists as an invariant solution and derive the necessary condition for a stable synchronization state in the presence of general coupling functions. It generalizes the well-known master stability function scheme to the higher-order structures with multiple interaction layers. We verify our theoretical results by employing them on networks of paradigmatic Rössler oscillators and Sherman neuronal models, and we demonstrate that the presence of group interactions considerably improves the synchronization phenomenon in the multilayer framework.

The thermodynamic nonequilibrium (TNE) effects in a coalescence process of two initially static bubbles under thermal conditions are investigated by a discrete Boltzmann model. The spatial distributions of the typical nonequilibrium quantity, i.e., nonorganized momentum fluxes (NOMFs), during evolutions are investigated in detail. The density-weighted statistical method is used to highlight the relationship between the TNE effects and the morphological and kinetics characteristics of bubble coalescence. The results show that the $xx$ component and $yy$ component of NOMFs are antisymmetrical; the $xy$ component changes from an antisymmetric internal and external double quadrupole structure to an outer octupole structure during the coalescence process. Moreover, the evolution of the averaged $xx$ component of NOMFs provides two characteristic instants, which divide the nonequilibrium process into three stages. The first instant, when the averaged $xx$ component of the NOMFs reaches its first local minimum, corresponds to the moment when the mean coalescence speed gets the maximum, and at this time the ratio of minor and major axes is about $1/2$. The second instant, when the averaged $xx$ component of the NOMFs gets its second local maximum, corresponds to the moment when the ratio of minor and major axes becomes 1 for the first time. It is interesting to find that the three quantities, TNE intensity, acceleration of coalescence, and the slope of boundary length, show a high degree of correlation and attain their maxima simultaneously. The surface tension and the heat conduction accelerate the process of bubble coalescence, while the viscosity delays it. Both the surface tension and the viscosity enhance the global nonequilibrium intensity, whereas the heat conduction restrains it. These TNE features and findings present some insights into the kinetics of bubble coalescence.