Conveners
M1-8 Statistical physics and biology (DCMMP) | Physique statistique et biologie (DPMCM)
- James Polson
Both natural ecosystems and biochemical reaction networks involve populations of heterogeneous agents whose cooperative and competitive interactions lead to a rich dynamics of species' abundances, albeit at vastly different scales. The maintenance of diversity in large ecosystems is a longstanding puzzle, towards which recent progress has been made by the derivation of dynamical mean-field...
Biological systems need to react to stimuli over a broad spectrum of timescales. If and how this
ability can emerge without external fine-tuning is a puzzle. This problem has been considered in
discrete Markovian systems where results from random matrix theory could be leveraged. Indeed,
generic large transition matrices are governed by universal results, which predict the absence of
long...
Some of the most intriguing thermodynamic phases in nature involve an interplay between multiple types of degrees of freedom. However, multiple types of degrees of freedom are also a common feature of design problems in distributed systems that can be cast in terms of complex networks. Here, we show that generic network models of design exhibit an intricate interplay between configurational...
In this paper, we study the dynamical properties of the exciton-polaron in the microtubule. The study was carried out using a unitary transformation and an approximate diagonalization technique. Analytically, the modeling of exciton-polaron dynamics in microtubules is presented. From this model, the ground state energy, mobility, and entropy of the exciton-polaron are derived as a function of...
Fascinating finger-like patterns are observed at the edge of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria colonies that grow at the effectively two-dimensional interface between agar and glass. We study this pattern formation phenomenon by simulating a dynamical self-consistent field theory. The twitching bacteria are modelled as self-propelled rods pushing against the agar-glass adhesion force,...
