Network Physiology: Mapping interactions between complex physiological systems

The human organism is an integrated network where multi-component organ systems, each with its own regulatory mechanisms, continuously interact to optimize and coordinate their function. Organ-to-organ interactions occur at multiple levels and spatiotemporal time scales to produce distinct physiologic states: wake and sleep; light and deep sleep; consciousness and unconsciousness. Disrupting organ communications can lead to dysfunction of individual systems or to collapse of the entire organism. Yet, we know almost nothing about the nature of the interactions between diverse organ systems and their collective role in maintaining health. We propose a framework to probe dynamical interactions among physiological systems, and we identify a physiological network. We find that each physiological state is characterized by a specific network structure, demonstrating a robust interplay between network topology and physiologic function. Across physiological states, the network undergoes topological transitions associated with fast reorganization of physiological interactions on time scales of a few minutes, indicating high network flexibility in response to perturbations. The proposed system-wide integrative approach facilitates the development of a new field, Network PhysiologyUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Systems with Correlations in the Variance: Generating Power-Law Tails in Probability Distributions

We study how the presence of correlations in physical variables contributes to the form of probability distributions. We investigate a process with correlations in the variance generated by (i) a Gaussian or (ii) a truncated L\'{e}vy distribution. For both (i) and (ii), we find that due to the correlations in the variance, the process ``dynamically'' generates power-law tails in the distributions, whose exponents can be controlled through the way the correlations in the variance are introduced. For (ii), we find that the process can extend a truncated distribution {\it beyond the truncation cutoff}, which leads to a crossover between a L\'{e}vy stable power law and the present ``dynamically-generated'' power law. We show that the process can explain the crossover behavior recently observed in the S&P500 stock index.Comment: 7 pages, five figures. To appear in Europhysics Letters (2000

Spurious detection of phase synchronization in coupled nonlinear oscillators

Coupled nonlinear systems under certain conditions exhibit phase synchronization, which may change for different frequency bands or with presence of additive system noise. In both cases, Fourier filtering is traditionally used to preprocess data. We investigate to what extent the phase synchronization of two coupled R\"{o}ssler oscillators depends on (1) the broadness of their power spectrum, (2) the width of the band-pass filter, and (3) the level of added noise. We find that for identical coupling strengths, oscillators with broader power spectra exhibit weaker synchronization. Further, we find that within a broad band width range, band-pass filtering reduces the effect of noise but can lead to a spurious increase in the degree of synchronization with narrowing band width, even when the coupling between the two oscillators remains the same.Comment: 4 pages,6 figure

Simulation of Jahn-Teller-Dicke Magnetic Structural Phase Transition with Trapped Ions

We study theoretically the collective E$\otimes$e Jahn-Teller-Dicke distortion in a system of trapped ions. We focus in the limit of infinite range interactions in which an ensemble of effective spins interacts with two collective vibrational modes with U(1) symmetric couplings. Our model is exactly solvable in the thermodynamical limit and it is amenable to be solved by exact numerical diagonalization for a moderate number of ions. We show that trapped ions are ideally suited to study the emergence of spontaneous symmetry breaking of a continuous symmetry and magnetic structural phase transition in a mesoscopic system.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure