Small Thermal Fluctuation on a Large Domain

Weak first-order phase transitions proceed with percolation of new phase. The kinematics of this process is clarified from the point of view of subcritical bubbles. We examine the effect of small subcritical bubbles around a large domain of asymmetric phase by introducing an effective geometry. The percolation process can be understood as a perpetual growth of the large domain aided by the small subcritical bubbles.Comment: 6 pages, latex, to be published in Progress of Theoretical Physic

Subcritical Superstrings

We introduce the Liouville mode into the Green-Schwarz superstring. Like massive supersymmetry without central charges, there is no kappa symmetry. However, the second-class constraints (and corresponding Wess-Zumino term) remain, and can be solved by (twisted) chiral superspace in dimensions D=4 and 6. The matter conformal anomaly is c = 4-D < 1. It thus can be canceled for physical dimensions by the usual Liouville methods, unlike the bosonic string (for which the consistency condition is c = D <= 1).Comment: 9 pg., compressed postscript file (.ps.Z), other formats (.dvi, .ps, .ps.Z, 8-bit .tex) available at http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/preprints/ or at ftp://max.physics.sunysb.edu/preprints/siege

Subcritical regimes in the Poisson Boolean model of continuum percolation

We consider the Poisson Boolean model of continuum percolation. We show that there is a subcritical phase if and only if $E(R^d)$ is finite, where $R$ denotes the radius of the balls around Poisson points and $d$ denotes the dimension. We also give related results concerning the integrability of the diameter of subcritical clusters.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOP352 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Anomalous scaling behavior in Takens-Bogdanov bifurcations

A general algorithm is presented for estimating the nonlinear instability threshold, $\sigma_c$, for subcritical transitions in systems where the linearized dynamics is significantly non-normal (i.e. subcritical bifurcations of {\em Takens-Bogdanov} type). The $N$-dimensional degenerate node is presented as an example. The predictions are then compared to numerical studies with excellent agreement.Comment: 6 page

Screening of Coulomb Impurities in Graphene

We calculate exactly the vacuum polarization charge density in the field of a subcritical Coulomb impurity, $Z|e|/r$, in graphene. Our analysis is based on the exact electron Green's function, obtained by using the operator method, and leads to results that are exact in the parameter $Z\alpha$, where $\alpha$ is the "fine structure constant" of graphene. Taking into account also electron-electron interactions in the Hartree approximation, we solve the problem self-consistently in the subcritical regime, where the impurity has an effective charge $Z_{eff}$, determined by the localized induced charge. We find that an impurity with bare charge Z=1 remains subcritical, $Z_{eff} \alpha < 1/2$, for any $\alpha$, while impurities with $Z=2,3$ and higher can become supercritical at certain values of $\alpha$.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Efficient collective influence maximization in cascading processes with first-order transitions

In social networks, the collective behavior of large populations can be shaped by a small set of influencers through a cascading process induced by "peer pressure". For large-scale networks, efficient identification of multiple influential spreaders with a linear algorithm in threshold models that exhibit a first-order transition still remains a challenging task. Here we address this issue by exploring the collective influence in general threshold models of behavior cascading. Our analysis reveals that the importance of spreaders is fixed by the subcritical paths along which cascades propagate: the number of subcritical paths attached to each spreader determines its contribution to global cascades. The concept of subcritical path allows us to introduce a linearly scalable algorithm for massively large-scale networks. Results in both synthetic random graphs and real networks show that the proposed method can achieve larger collective influence given same number of seeds compared with other linearly scalable heuristic approaches.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure