Two scales in asynchronous ballistic annihilation

Ballistic annihilation with superimposed diffusion in one dimension

We consider a one-dimensional system with particles having either positive or negative velocity, and these particles annihilate on contact. Diffusion is superimposed on the ballistic motion of the particle. The annihilation may represent a reaction in which the two particles yield an inert species. This model has been the subject of previous work, in which it was shown that the particle concentration decays faster than either the purely ballistic or the purely diffusive case. We report on previously unnoticed behavior for large times when only one of the two species remains, and we also unravel the underlying fractal structure present in the system. We also consider in detail the case in which the initial concentration of right-going particles is 1/2+ɛ, with ɛ≠0. It is shown that remarkably rich behavior arises, in which two crossover times are observed as ɛ→0.

Evolutionary dynamics for persistent cooperation in structured populations

The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is a fascinating topic in evolutionary biology and social science. The public goods game (PGG) is a paradigm for exploring cooperative behavior. In PGG, the total resulting payoff is divided equally among all participants. This feature still leads to the dominance of defection without substantially magnifying the public good by a multiplying factor. Much effort has been made to explain the evolution of cooperative strategies, including a recent model in which only a portion of the total benefit is shared by all the players through introducing a new strategy named persistent cooperation. A persistent cooperator is a contributor who is willing to pay a second cost to retrieve the remaining portion of the payoff contributed by themselves. In a previous study, this model was analyzed in the framework of well-mixed populations. This paper focuses on discussing the persistent cooperation in lattice-structured populations. The evolutionary dynamics of the structured populations consisting of three types of competing players (pure cooperators, defectors, and persistent cooperators) are revealed by theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. In particular, the approximate expressions of fixation probabilities for strategies are derived on one-dimensional lattices. The phase diagrams of stationary states, and the evolution of frequencies and spatial patterns for strategies are illustrated on both one-dimensional and square lattices by simulations. Our results are consistent with the general observation that, at least in most situations, a structured population facilitates the evolution of cooperation. Specifically, here we find that the existence of persistent cooperators greatly suppresses the spreading of defectors under more relaxed conditions in structured populations compared to that obtained in well-mixed populations.

Static pairwise annihilation in complex networks

We study static annihilation on complex networks, in which pairs of connected particles annihilate at a constant rate during time. Through a mean-field formalism, we compute the temporal evolution of the distribution of surviving sites with an arbitrary number of connections. This general formalism, which is exact for disordered networks, is applied to Kronecker, Erdös-Rényi (i.e., Poisson), and scale-free networks. We compare our theoretical results with extensive numerical simulations obtaining excellent agreement. Although the mean-field approach applies in an exact way neither to ordered lattices nor to small-world networks, it qualitatively describes the annihilation dynamics in such structures. Our results indicate that the higher the connectivity of a given network element, the faster it annihilates. This fact has dramatic consequences in scale-free networks, for which, once the "hubs" have been annihilated, the network disintegrates and only isolated sites are left.

Ballistic annihilation with continuous isotropic initial velocity distribution

Ballistic annihilation with continuous initial velocity distributions is investigated in the framework of the Boltzmann equation. The particle density and the rms velocity decay as c approximately t(-alpha) and velocity approximately t(-beta), with the exponents depending on the initial velocity distribution and the spatial dimension d. For instance, in one dimension for the uniform initial velocity distribution beta = 0.230 472ellipsis. In the opposite extreme d-->infinity, the dynamics is universal and beta-->(1-2(-1/2))d(-1). We also solve the Boltzmann equation for Maxwell particles and very hard particles in arbitrary spatial dimension. These solvable cases provide bounds for the decay exponents of the hard sphere gas.