Advection of passive particles over flow networks

Mode Selection in Compressible Active Flow Networks

Coherent, large-scale dynamics in many nonequilibrium physical, biological, or information transport networks are driven by small-scale local energy input. Here, we introduce and explore an analytically tractable nonlinear model for compressible active flow networks. In contrast to thermally driven systems, we find that active friction selects discrete states with a limited number of oscillation modes activated at distinct fixed amplitudes. Using perturbation theory, we systematically predict the stationary states of noisy networks and find good agreement with a Bayesian state estimation based on a hidden Markov model applied to simulated time series data. Our results suggest that the macroscopic response of active network structures, from actomyosin force networks to cytoplasmic flows, can be dominated by a significantly reduced number of modes, in contrast to energy equipartition in thermal equilibrium. The model is also well suited to study topological sound modes and spectral band gaps in active matter.

Localization of Laplacian eigenvectors on random networks

In large random networks, each eigenvector of the Laplacian matrix tends to localize on a subset of network nodes having similar numbers of edges, namely, the components of each Laplacian eigenvector take relatively large values only on a particular subset of nodes whose degrees are close. Although this localization property has significant consequences for dynamical processes on random networks, a clear theoretical explanation has not yet been established. Here we analyze the origin of localization of Laplacian eigenvectors on random networks by using a perturbation theory. We clarify how heterogeneity in the node degrees leads to the eigenvector localization and that there exists a clear degree-eigenvalue correspondence, that is, the characteristic degrees of the localized nodes essentially determine the eigenvalues. We show that this theory can account for the localization properties of Laplacian eigenvectors on several classes of random networks, and argue that this localization should occur generally in networks with degree heterogeneity.

Price of anarchy is maximized at the percolation threshold

When many independent users try to route traffic through a network, the flow can easily become suboptimal as a consequence of congestion of the most efficient paths. The degree of this suboptimality is quantified by the so-called price of anarchy (POA), but so far there are no general rules for when to expect a large POA in a random network. Here I address this question by introducing a simple model of flow through a network with randomly placed congestible and incongestible links. I show that the POA is maximized precisely when the fraction of congestible links matches the percolation threshold of the lattice. Both the POA and the total cost demonstrate critical scaling near the percolation threshold.