15,915 research outputs found
A Simple Model of Epidemics with Pathogen Mutation
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen
mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly
models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted
individuals becoming infected only if they are exposed to strains that are
significantly different from other strains in their memory repertoire. The
second model is a reduction of the first to a system of difference equations.
In this case, individuals spend a fixed amount of time in a generalized immune
class. In both models, we observe four fundamentally different types of
behavior, depending on parameters: (1) pathogen extinction due to lack of
contact between individuals, (2) endemic infection (3) periodic epidemic
outbreaks, and (4) one or more outbreaks followed by extinction of the epidemic
due to extremely low minima in the oscillations. We analyze both models to
determine the location of each transition. Our main result is that pathogens in
highly connected populations must mutate rapidly in order to remain viable.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure
Oscillation-free method for semilinear diffusion equations under noisy initial conditions
Noise in initial conditions from measurement errors can create unwanted
oscillations which propagate in numerical solutions. We present a technique of
prohibiting such oscillation errors when solving initial-boundary-value
problems of semilinear diffusion equations. Symmetric Strang splitting is
applied to the equation for solving the linear diffusion and nonlinear
remainder separately. An oscillation-free scheme is developed for overcoming
any oscillatory behavior when numerically solving the linear diffusion portion.
To demonstrate the ills of stable oscillations, we compare our method using a
weighted implicit Euler scheme to the Crank-Nicolson method. The
oscillation-free feature and stability of our method are analyzed through a
local linearization. The accuracy of our oscillation-free method is proved and
its usefulness is further verified through solving a Fisher-type equation where
oscillation-free solutions are successfully produced in spite of random errors
in the initial conditions.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure
Birhythmicity, Synchronization, and Turbulence in an Oscillatory System with Nonlocal Inertial Coupling
We consider a model where a population of diffusively coupled limit-cycle
oscillators, described by the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, interacts
nonlocally via an inertial field. For sufficiently high intensity of nonlocal
inertial coupling, the system exhibits birhythmicity with two oscillation modes
at largely different frequencies. Stability of uniform oscillations in the
birhythmic region is analyzed by means of the phase dynamics approximation.
Numerical simulations show that, depending on its parameters, the system has
irregular intermittent regimes with local bursts of synchronization or
desynchronization.Comment: 21 pages, many figures. Paper accepted on Physica
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