On the large order behaviour of the Potts model

Following the work by Houghton, Reeve and Wallace about an alternative formulation of the $n \to 0$ limit of the $(n+1)$ state Potts model in field theory for the large order behaviour of the perturbative expansion, we generalise their technique to all $n$ by establishing an equivalence in perturbation theory order by order with another bosonic field theory. Restricting ourselves to a cubic interaction, we obtain an explicit expression (in terms of~$n$) for the large order behaviour of the partition function.Comment: 16 pages, require TeXdra

The fragility of decentralised trustless socio-technical systems

The blockchain technology promises to transform finance, money and even governments. However, analyses of blockchain applicability and robustness typically focus on isolated systems whose actors contribute mainly by running the consensus algorithm. Here, we highlight the importance of considering trustless platforms within the broader ecosystem that includes social and communication networks. As an example, we analyse the flash-crash observed on 21st June 2017 in the Ethereum platform and show that a major phenomenon of social coordination led to a catastrophic cascade of events across several interconnected systems. We propose the concept of “emergent centralisation” to describe situations where a single system becomes critically important for the functioning of the whole ecosystem, and argue that such situations are likely to become more and more frequent in interconnected socio-technical systems. We anticipate that the systemic approach we propose will have implications for future assessments of trustless systems and call for the attention of policy-makers on the fragility of our interconnected and rapidly changing world

Modeling Structure and Resilience of the Dark Network

While the statistical and resilience properties of the Internet are no more changing significantly across time, the Darknet, a network devoted to keep anonymous its traffic, still experiences rapid changes to improve the security of its users. Here, we study the structure of the Darknet and we find that its topology is rather peculiar, being characterized by non-homogenous distribution of connections -- typical of scale-free networks --, very short path lengths and high clustering -- typical of small-world networks -- and lack of a core of highly connected nodes. We propose a model to reproduce such features, demonstrating that the mechanisms used to improve cyber-security are responsible for the observed topology. Unexpectedly, we reveal that its peculiar structure makes the Darknet much more resilient than the Internet -- used as a benchmark for comparison at a descriptive level -- to random failures, targeted attacks and cascade failures, as a result of adaptive changes in response to the attempts of dismantling the network across time.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Fast detection of nonlinearity and nonstationarity in short and noisy time series

We introduce a statistical method to detect nonlinearity and nonstationarity in time series, that works even for short sequences and in presence of noise. The method has a discrimination power similar to that of the most advanced estimators on the market, yet it depends only on one parameter, is easier to implement and faster. Applications to real data sets reject the null hypothesis of an underlying stationary linear stochastic process with a higher confidence interval than the best known nonlinear discriminators up to date.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Higher order elliptic operators on variable domains. Stability results and boundary oscillations for intermediate problems

We study the spectral behavior of higher order elliptic operators upon domain perturbation. We prove general spectral stability results for Dirichlet, Neumann and intermediate boundary conditions. Moreover, we consider the case of the bi-harmonic operator with those intermediate boundary conditions which ap-pears in the study of hinged plates. In this case, we analyze the spectral behavior when the boundary of the domain is subject to a periodic oscillatory perturbation. We will show that there is a critical oscillatory behavior and the limit problem depends on whether we are above, below or just sitting on this critical value. In particular, in the critical case we identify the strange term appearing in the limiting boundary conditions by using the unfolding method from homogenization theory