6,024 research outputs found
Imperfect Mimicry and the Limits of Natural Selection
Mimicry—when one organism (the mimic) evolves a phenotypic resemblance to another (the model) due to selective benefits—is widely used to illustrate natural selection’s power to generate adaptations. However, many putative mimics resemble their models imprecisely, and such imperfect mimicry represents a specific challenge to mimicry theory and a general one to evolutionary theory. Here, we discuss 11 nonmutually exclusive hypotheses for imperfect mimicry. We group these hypotheses according to whether imperfect mimicry reflects: an artifact of human perception, which is not shared by any naturally occurring predators and therefore is not truly an instance of imperfect mimicry; genetic, developmental, or time-lag constraints, which (temporarily) prevent a response to selection for perfect mimicry; relaxed selection, where imperfect mimicry is as adaptive as perfect mimicry; or tradeoffs, where imperfect mimicry is (locally) more adaptive than perfect mimicry. We find that the relaxed selection hypothesis has garnered the most support. However, because only a few study systems have thus far been comprehensively evaluated, the relative contributions of the various hypotheses toward explaining the evolution of imperfect mimicry remain unclear. Ultimately, clarifying why imperfect mimicry exists should provide critical insights into the limits of natural selection in producing complex adaptations
Universal properties of highly frustrated quantum magnets in strong magnetic fields
The purpose of the present paper is two-fold. On the one hand, we review some
recent studies on the low-temperature strong-field thermodynamic properties of
frustrated quantum spin antiferromagnets which admit the so-called
localized-magnon eigenstates. One the other hand, we provide some complementary
new results. We focus on the linear independence of the localized-magnon
states, the estimation of their degeneracy with the help of auxiliary classical
lattice-gas models and the analysis of the contribution of these states to
thermodynamics.Comment: Paper based on the invited talk given by J. Richter at the
International Conference "Statistical Physics 2006. Condensed Matter: Theory
and Applications" dedicated to the 90th anniversary of Ilya Lifshitz
(Kharkiv, 11-15 September, 2006
A q-analogue of gl_3 hierarchy and q-Painleve VI
A q-analogue of the gl_3 Drinfel'd-Sokolov hierarchy is proposed as a
reduction of the q-KP hierarchy. Applying a similarity reduction and a
q-Laplace transformation to the hierarchy, one can obtain the q-Painleve VI
equation proposed by Jimbo and Sakai.Comment: 14 pages, IOP style, to appear in J. Phys. A Special issue "One
hundred years of Painleve VI
Cluster variation - Pade` approximants method for the simple cubic Ising model
The cluster variation - Pade` approximant method is a recently proposed tool,
based on the extrapolation of low/high temperature results obtained with the
cluster variation method, for the determination of critical parameters in
Ising-like models. Here the method is applied to the three-dimensional simple
cubic Ising model, and new results, obtained with an 18-site basic cluster, are
reported. Other techniques for extracting non-classical critical exponents are
also applied and their results compared with those by the cluster variation -
Pade` approximant method.Comment: 8 RevTeX pages, 3 PostScript figure
Statistics of correlated percolation in a bacterial community
Signal propagation over long distances is a ubiquitous feature of multicellular communities, but cell-to-cell variability can cause propagation to be highly heterogeneous. Simple models of signal propagation in heterogenous media, such as percolation theory, can potentially provide a quantitative understanding of these processes, but it is unclear whether these simple models properly capture the complexities of multicellular systems. We recently discovered that in biofilms of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, the propagation of an electrical signal is statistically consistent with percolation theory, and yet it is reasonable to suspect that key features of this system go beyond the simple assumptions of basic percolation theory. Indeed, we find here that the probability for a cell to signal is not independent from other cells as assumed in percolation theory, but instead is correlated with its nearby neighbors. We develop a mechanistic model, in which correlated signaling emerges from cell division, phenotypic inheritance, and cell displacement, that reproduces the experimentally observed correlations. We find that the correlations do not significantly affect the spatial statistics, which we rationalize using a renormalization argument. Moreover, the fraction of signaling cells is not constant in space, as assumed in percolation theory, but instead varies within and across biofilms. We find that this feature lowers the fraction of signaling cells at which one observes the characteristic power-law statistics of cluster sizes, consistent with our experimental results. We validate the model using a mutant biofilm whose signaling probability decays along the propagation direction. Our results reveal key statistical features of a correlated signaling process in a multicellular community. More broadly, our results identify extensions to percolation theory that do or do not alter its predictions and may be more appropriate for biological systems.P50 GM085764 - NIGMS NIH HHS; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; R01 GM121888 - NIGMS NIH HHSPublished versio
Generarized Cubic Model for BaTiO-like Ferroelectric Substance
We propose an order-disorder type microscopic model for BaTiO-like
Ferroelectric Substance. Our model has three phase transitions and four phases.
The symmetry and directions of the polarizations of the ordered phases agree
with the experimental results of BaTiO. The intermediate phases in our
model are known as an incompletely ordered phase, which appears in a
generalized clock model.Comment: 6 pages, 4figure
Quantum Phase Transition in the Itinerant Antiferromagnet (V0.9Ti0.1)2O3
Quantum-critical behavior of the itinerant electron antiferromagnet
(V0.9Ti0.1)2O3 has been studied by single-crystal neutron scattering. By
directly observing antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations in the paramagnetic
phase, we have shown that the characteristic energy depends on temperature as
c_1 + c_2 T^{3/2}, where c_1 and c_2 are constants. This T^{3/2} dependence
demonstrates that the present strongly correlated d-electron antiferromagnet
clearly shows the criticality of the spin-density-wave quantum phase transition
in three space dimensions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Hybrid expansions for local structural relaxations
A model is constructed in which pair potentials are combined with the cluster
expansion method in order to better describe the energetics of structurally
relaxed substitutional alloys. The effect of structural relaxations away from
the ideal crystal positions, and the effect of ordering is described by
interatomic-distance dependent pair potentials, while more subtle
configurational aspects associated with correlations of three- and more sites
are described purely within the cluster expansion formalism. Implementation of
such a hybrid expansion in the context of the cluster variation method or Monte
Carlo method gives improved ability to model phase stability in alloys from
first-principles.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur
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