Nonsymmetric Interactions Trigger Collective Swings in Globally Ordered Systems.

Many systems in nature, from ferromagnets to flocks of birds, exhibit ordering phenomena on the large scale. In condensed matter systems, order is statistically robust for large enough dimensions, with relative fluctuations due to noise vanishing with system size. Several biological systems, however, are less stable and spontaneously change their global state on relatively short time scales. Here we show that there are two crucial ingredients in these systems that enhance the effect of noise, leading to collective changes of state on finite time scales and off-equilibrium behavior: the nonsymmetric nature of interactions between individuals, and the presence of local heterogeneities in the topology of the network. Our results might explain what is observed in several living systems and are consistent with recent experimental data on bird flocks and other animal groups.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2016-05-03

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.138003arXiv 1605.00986PMID 28409952
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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