Explosive death phenomenon has been gradually gaining attention of researchers due to the research boom of explosive synchronization, and it has been observed recently for the identical or nonidentical coupled systems in all-to-all network. In this work, we investigate the emergence of explosive death in networked Van der Pol (VdP) oscillators with conjugate variables coupling. It is demonstrated that the network structures play a crucial role in identifying the types of explosive death behaviors. We also observe that the damping coefficient of the VdP system not only can determine whether the explosive death state is generated but also can adjust the forward transition point. We further show that the backward transition point is independent of the network topologies and the damping coefficient, which is well confirmed by theoretical analysis. Our results reveal the generality of explosive death phenomenon in different network topologies and are propitious to promote a better comprehension for the oscillation quenching behaviors.

We generalize the original majority-vote (MV) model from two states to arbitrary $p$ states and study the order-disorder phase transitions in such a $p$-state MV model on complex networks. By extensive Monte Carlo simulations and a mean-field theory, we show that for $p\ge 3$ the order of phase transition is essentially different from a continuous second-order phase transition in the original two-state MV model. Instead, for $p\ge 3$ the model displays a discontinuous first-order phase transition, which is manifested by the appearance of the hysteresis phenomenon near the phase transition. Within the hysteresis loop, the ordered phase and disordered phase are coexisting, and rare flips between the two phases can be observed due to the finite-size fluctuation. Moreover, we investigate the type of phase transition under a slightly modified dynamics [Melo et al., J. Stat. Mech. (2010) P11032]. We find that the order of phase transition in the three-state MV model depends on the degree heterogeneity of networks. For $p\ge 4$, both dynamics produce the first-order phase transitions.

Vascular compliance is a major determinant of wave propagation within the vascular system, and hence the measurement of pulse wave velocity (PWV) is commonly used clinically as a method of detecting vascular stiffening. The accuracy of that assessment is important because vascular stiffening is a major risk factor for hypertension. PWV is usually measured by timing a pressure wave as it travels from the carotid artery to the femoral or radial artery and estimating the distance that it traveled in each case to obtain the required velocity. A major assumption on which this technique is based is that the vessel wall thickness $h$ is negligibly small compared with the vessel radius $a$. The extent to which this assumption is satisfied in the cardiovascular system is not known because the ratio $h/a$ varies widely across different regions of the vascular tree and under different pathological conditions. Using the PWV as a diagnostic test without knowing the effect of wall thickness on the measurement could lead to error when interpreting the PWV value as an index of vessel wall compliance. The aim of the present study was to extend the validity of the current practice of assessing wall stiffness by developing a method of analysis that goes beyond the assumption of a thin wall. We analyzed PWVs calculated with different wall models, depending on the ratio of wall thickness to vessel radius and the results showed that PWV is not reliable when it is estimated with the classic thin wall theory if the vessel wall is not around 25% of vessel radius. If the arterial wall is thicker than 25% of vessel radius, then the wave velocity calculated with the thin wall theory could be overestimated and in the clinical setting, this could lead to a false positive. For thicker walls, a thick wall model presented here should be considered to account for the stresses within the wall thickness that become dominant compared with the wall inertia.

Echolocating bats use ultrasonic pulses to collect information about their environments. Some of this information is encoded at the baffle structures—noseleaves (emission) and pinnae (reception)—that act as interfaces between the bats' biosonar systems and the external world. The baffle beam patterns encode the direction-dependent sensory information as a function of frequency and hence represent a view of the environment. To generate diverse views of the environment, the bats can vary beam patterns by changes to (1) the wavelengths of the pulses or (2) the baffle geometries. Here we compare the variability in sensory information encoded by just the use of frequency or baffle shape dynamics in horseshoe bats. For this, we use digital and physical prototypes of both noseleaf and pinnae. The beam patterns for all prototypes were either measured or numerically predicted. Entropy was used as a measure to compare variability as a measure of sensory information encoding capacity. It was found that new information was acquired as a result of shape dynamics. Furthermore, the overall variability available for information encoding was similar in the case of frequency or shape dynamics. Thus, shape dynamics allows the horseshoe bats to generate diverse views of the environment in the absence of broadband biosonar signals.

We show that the yielding transition in granular media displays second-order critical-point scaling behavior. We carry out discrete element simulations in the low-inertial-number limit for frictionless, purely repulsive spherical grains undergoing simple shear at fixed nondimensional shear stress $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ in two and three spatial dimensions. To find a mechanically stable (MS) packing that can support the applied $\mathrm{\Sigma }$, isotropically prepared states with size $L$ must undergo a total strain ${\gamma }_{\mathrm{ms}}(\mathrm{\Sigma },L)$. The number density of MS packings ($\propto {\gamma }_{\mathrm{ms}}^{-1}$) vanishes for $\mathrm{\Sigma }>{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c\approx 0.11$ according to a critical scaling form with a length scale $\xi \propto |\mathrm{\Sigma }-{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c{|}^{-\nu }$, where $\nu \approx 1.7–1.8$. Above the yield stress ($\mathrm{\Sigma }>{\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$), no MS packings that can support $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ exist in the large-system limit $L/\xi \gg 1$. MS packings generated via shear possess anisotropic force and contact networks, suggesting that ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c$ is associated with an upper limit in the degree to which these networks can be deformed away from those for isotropic packings.

The modulus of a rigid network of harmonic springs depends on the sum of the energies in each of the bonds due to an applied distortion such as compression in the case of the bulk modulus or shear in the case of the shear modulus. However, the distortion need not be global. Here we introduce a local modulus, $L_i$, associated with changing the equilibrium length of a single bond, $i$, in the network. We show that $L_i$ is useful for understanding many aspects of the mechanical response of the entire system. It allows an efficient computation of how the removal of any bond changes the global properties such as the bulk and shear moduli. Furthermore, it allows a prediction of the distribution of these changes and clarifies why the changes of these two moduli due to removal of a bond are uncorrelated; these are the essential ingredients necessary for the efficient manipulation of network properties by bond removal.

Spiral wave formations are ubiquitous in nature. In the present paper, the excitation of spiral waves in the context of driven two-dimensional dusty plasma (Yukawa system) has been demonstrated at particle level using molecular-dynamics simulations. The interaction amidst dust particles is modeled by the Yukawa potential to take account of the shielding of dust charges by the lighter electron and ion species. The spatiotemporal evolution of these spiral waves has been characterized as a function of the frequency and amplitude of the driving force and dust neutral collisions. The effect of strong coupling has been studied, which shows that the excited spiral wave structures get clearer as the medium gets more strongly coupled. The radial propagation speed of the spiral wave is observed to remain unaltered with the coupling parameter. However, it is found to depend on the screening parameter of the dust medium and decreases when it is increased. In the crystalline phase (with screening parameter $\kappa >0.58$), the spiral wavefronts are shown to be hexagonal in shape. This shows that the radial propagation speed depends on the interparticle spacing.

We experimentally investigate discrete avalanches of grains, driven by a low inflow rate, on an erodible pile in a channel. We observe intermittency between one regime, in which avalanches are quasiperiodic and system spanning, and another, in which they pass at irregular intervals and have a power-law size distribution. Observations are robust to changes of inflow rate and grain type and require no tuning of external parameters. We demonstrate that the state of the pile's surface determines whether avalanche fronts propagate to the end of the channel or stop partway down, and we introduce a toy model for the latter case that reproduces the observed power-law size distribution. We suggest direct applications to avalanches of pharmaceutical and geophysical grains, and the possibility of reconciling the “self-organized criticality” predicted by several authors with the hysteretic behavior described by others.

The escape of energy injected into one site in a disordered chain of nonlinear oscillators is examined numerically. When the disorder has a “fractal” pattern, the decay of the residual energy at the injection site can be fit to a stretched exponential with an exponent that varies continuously with the control parameter. At low temperature, we see evidence that energy can be trapped for an infinite time at the original site, i.e., classical many body localization.

We study the beating effects of solitons in multicomponent coupled Bose-Einstein condensate systems. Our analysis indicates that the period of beating behavior is determined by the energy eigenvalue difference in the effective quantum well induced by solitons, and the beating pattern is determined by the eigenstates of a quantum well, which are involved in the beating behavior. We show that the beating solitons correspond to linear superpositions of eigenstates in some quantum wells, and the correspondence relations are identical for solitons in both an attractive interaction and a repulsive interaction condensate. This provides a possible way to understand the beating effects of solitons for attractive and repulsive interaction cases in a unified way, based on the knowledge of quantum eigenstates. Moreover, our results demonstrate many different beating patterns for solitons in multicomponent coupled condensates, in sharp contrast to the beating dark soliton reported before. The beating behavior can be used to test the eigenvalue differences in certain quantum wells, and more abundant beating patterns are expected to exist in more component-coupled systems.

A transmission amplitude is considered for quantum or wave transport mediated by a single resonance coupled to the background of many chaotic states. Such a model provides a useful approach to quantify fluctuations in an established signal induced by a complex environment. Applying random matrix theory to the problem, we derive an exact result for the joint distribution of the transmission intensity (envelope) and the transmission phase at arbitrary coupling to the background with finite absorption. The intensity and phase are distributed within a certain region, revealing essential correlations even at strong absorption. In the latter limit, we obtain a simple asymptotic expression that provides a uniformly good approximation of the exact distribution within its whole support, thus going beyond the Rician distribution often used for such purposes. Exact results are also derived for the marginal distribution of the phase, including its limiting forms at weak and strong absorption.

As new instances of nested organization—beyond ecological networks—are discovered, scholars are debating the coexistence of two apparently incompatible macroscale architectures: nestedness and modularity. The discussion is far from being solved, mainly for two reasons. First, nestedness and modularity appear to emerge from two contradictory dynamics, cooperation and competition. Second, existing methods to assess the presence of nestedness and modularity are flawed when it comes to the evaluation of concurrently nested and modular structures. In this work, we tackle the latter problem, presenting the concept of in-block nestedness, a structural property determining to what extent a network is composed of blocks whose internal connectivity exhibits nestedness. We then put forward a set of optimization methods that allow us to identify such organization successfully, in synthetic and in a large number of real networks. These findings challenge our understanding of the topology of ecological and social systems, calling for new models to explain how such patterns emerge.

In this paper, we integrate a cellular automaton model with game theory to simulate crowd evacuation from a room with consideration of obstacle removal. The room has one or more exits, one of which is blocked by obstacles. The obstacles at the exit can be removed by volunteers. We investigate the cooperative and defective behaviors of pedestrians during evacuation. The yielder game and volunteer's dilemma game are employed to resolve interpedestrian conflict. An anticipation floor field is proposed to guide the pedestrians to avoid obstacles that are being removed. We conducted experiments to determine how a variety of conditions affect overall crowd evacuation and volunteer evacuation times. The conditions were the start time of obstacle removal, number of obstacles, placement of obstacles, time spent in obstacle removal, strength of the anticipation floor field, and obstacle visibility distance. We demonstrate how reciprocity can be achieved among pedestrians and increases the efficiency of the entire evacuation process.

We analytically study the polymer-mediated (PM) interactions between spherical particles immersed in a symmetric polymer blend. By making use of standard methods of the liquid state theory we have found out a nonconventional mechanism of the PM interactions caused by nonuniformities in the local composition of the polymer blend induced by the particles. The relative significance of the contributions to the PM interaction potential due to the finite compressibility of the polymer blend and its compositional nonuniformity is found to drastically depend on the polymer-to-particle size ratio. In the protein limit of relatively small particles, the mechanism due to the compositional nonuniformity, specific to polymer blends, is shown to play a dominant role in the PM interactions.

Several years ago, it had been discussed that nonlogarithmic entropies, such as the Tsallis $q$-entropy cannot be applied to systems with continuous variables. Now, in their recent paper [Phys. Rev. E 97, 012104 (2018)], Oikonomou and Bagci have modified the form of the $q$-entropy for discrete variables in such a way that its continuum limit exists. Here, it is shown that this modification violates the expandability property of entropy, and their work is actually supporting evidence for the absence of the $q$-entropy for systems with continuous variables.

It has been known for some time that the usual $q$-entropy $S_q^{\left(n\right)}$ cannot be shown to converge to the continuous case. In Phys. Rev. E 97, 012104 (2018), we have shown that the discrete $q$-entropy ${\tilde{S}}_q^{\left(n\right)}$ converges to the continuous case when the total number of states are properly taken into account in terms of a convergence factor. Ou and Abe [previous Comment, Phys. Rev. E 97, 066101 (2018)] noted that this form of the discrete $q$-entropy does not conform to the Shannon-Khinchin expandability axiom. As a reply, we note that the fulfillment or not of the expandability property by the discrete $q$-entropy strongly depends on the origin of the convergence factor, presenting an example in which ${\tilde{S}}_q^{\left(n\right)}$ is expandable.

To model the dependence of extreme events on locations, we consider extreme events of Brownian particles in a potential. We find that barring the exception of very large potentials and/or very small regions, in general, the probability of extreme events increases with the potential. Our approach is general and can be useful for studying several complex systems.

The stochastic thermodynamic analysis of a time-periodic single particle pump sequentially exposed to three thermochemical reservoirs is presented. The analysis provides explicit results for flux, thermodynamic force, entropy production, work, and heat. These results apply near equilibrium as well as far from equilibrium. In the linear response regime, a different type of Onsager-Casimir symmetry is uncovered. The Onsager matrix becomes symmetric in the limit of zero dissipation.

Identifying and quantifying spatial correlation are important aspects of studying the collective behavior of multiagent systems. Pair correlation functions (PCFs) are powerful statistical tools that can provide qualitative and quantitative information about correlation between pairs of agents. Despite the numerous PCFs defined for off-lattice domains, only a few recent studies have considered a PCF for discrete domains. Our work extends the study of spatial correlation in discrete domains by defining a new set of PCFs using two natural and intuitive definitions of distance for a square lattice: the taxicab and uniform metric. We show how these PCFs improve upon previous attempts and compare between the quantitative data acquired. We also extend our definitions of the PCF to other types of regular tessellation that have not been studied before, including hexagonal, triangular, and cuboidal. Finally, we provide a comprehensive PCF for any tessellation and metric, allowing investigation of spatial correlation in irregular lattices for which recognizing correlation is less intuitive.

Recent research on the thermodynamic arrow of time, at the microscopic scale, has questioned the universality of its direction. Theoretical studies showed that quantum correlations can be used to revert the natural heat flow (from the hot body to the cold one), posing an apparent challenge to the second law of thermodynamics. Such an “anomalous” heat current was observed in a recent experiment (K. Micadei et al., arXiv:1711.03323), by employing two spin systems initially quantum correlated. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between this intriguing phenomenon and the initial conditions that allow it is not fully evident. Here, we address energy transfer in a wider perspective, identifying a nonclassical contribution that applies to the reversion of the heat flow as well as to more general forms of energy exchange. We derive three theorems that describe the energy transfer between two microscopic systems, for arbitrary initial bipartite states. Using these theorems, we obtain an analytical bound showing that certain type of quantum coherence can optimize such a process, outperforming incoherent states. This genuine quantum advantage is corroborated through a characterization of the energy transfer between two qubits. For this system, it is shown that a large enough amount of coherence is necessary and sufficient to revert the thermodynamic arrow of time. As a second crucial consequence of the presented theorems, we introduce a class of nonequilibrium states that only allow unidirectional energy flow. In this way, we broaden the set where the standard Clausius statement of the second law applies.