Erraticity of Rapidity Gaps

The use of rapidity gaps is proposed as a measure of the spatial pattern of an event. When the event multiplicity is low, the gaps between neighboring particles carry far more information about an event than multiplicity spikes, which may occur very rarely. Two moments of the gap distrubiton are suggested for characterizing an event. The fluctuations of those moments from event to event are then quantified by an entropy-like measure, which serves to describe erraticity. We use ECOMB to simulate the exclusive rapidity distribution of each event, from which the erraticity measures are calculated. The dependences of those measures on the order of $q$ of the moments provide single-parameter characterizations of erraticity.Comment: 10 pages LaTeX + 5 figures p

Phase Transition in Evolutionary Games

The evolution of cooperative behaviour is studied in the deterministic version of the Prisoners' Dilemma on a two-dimensional lattice. The payoff parameter is set at the critical region $1.8 < b < 2.0$ , where clusters of cooperators are formed in all spatial sizes. Using the factorial moments developed in particle and nuclear physics for the study of phase transition, the distribution of cooperators is studied as a function of the bin size covering varying numbers of lattice cells. From the scaling behaviour of the moments a scaling exponent is determined and is found to lie in the range where phase transitions are known to take place in physical systems. It is therefore inferred that when the payoff parameter is increased through the critical region the biological system of cooperators undergoes a phase transition to defectors. The universality of the critical behaviour is thus extended to include also this particular model of evolution dynamics.Comment: 12 pages + 3 figures, latex, submitted to Natur

Synchronization in an array of linearly stochastically coupled networks with time delays

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link - Copyright 2007 Elsevier LtdIn this paper, the complete synchronization problem is investigated in an array of linearly stochastically coupled identical networks with time delays. The stochastic coupling term, which can reflect a more realistic dynamical behavior of coupled systems in practice, is introduced to model a coupled system, and the influence from the stochastic noises on the array of coupled delayed neural networks is studied thoroughly. Based on a simple adaptive feedback control scheme and some stochastic analysis techniques, several sufficient conditions are developed to guarantee the synchronization in an array of linearly stochastically coupled neural networks with time delays. Finally, an illustrate example with numerical simulations is exploited to show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60574043, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK2006093, and International Joint Project funded by NSFC and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom

Critical Behavior of Hadronic Fluctuations and the Effect of Final-State Randomization

The critical behaviors of quark-hadron phase transition are explored by use of the Ising model adapted for hadron production. Various measures involving the fluctuations of the produced hadrons in bins of various sizes are examined with the aim of quantifying the clustering properties that are universal features of all critical phenomena. Some of the measures involve wavelet analysis. Two of the measures are found to exhibit the canonical power-law behavior near the critical temperature. The effect of final-state randomization is studied by requiring the produced particles to take random walks in the transverse plane. It is demonstrated that for the measures considered the dependence on the randomization process is weak. Since temperature is not a directly measurable variable, the average hadronic density of a portion of each event is used as the control variable that is measurable. The event-to-event fluctuations are taken into account in the study of the dependence of the chosen measures on that control variable. Phenomenologically verifiable critical behaviors are found and are proposed for use as a signature of quark-hadron phase transition in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 17 pages (Latex) + 24 figures (ps file), submitted to Phys. Rev.