EPJ B welcomes new Editor-in-Chief Philipp Hövel
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- Published on 20 January 2025
The European Physical Journal B is glad to annouce that Dr. Philipp Hövel (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany) has been appointed as Editor-in-Chief for the section on statistical physics and complex systems.
Dr. Hövel will work alongside Prof. Egger to continue guiding and developing the journal.
The journal and the Publishers, take the opportunity to thank Prof. Heiko Rieger whose work and leadership have been invaluable.
EPJ B Topical Issue - New Trends in Statistical Physics of Complex Systems: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches
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- Published on 14 January 2025
Guest Editors: Tiziana Di Matteo, Giorgio Kaniadakis, Antonio Scarfone, Gianpiero Gervino
This Topical Issue of EPJ B brings together a collection of articles on the recent progress of the theoretical aspects and application in statistical physics of complex systems.
A strong framework for comprehending the behavior of complex systems is provided by statistical physics. Complex systems have emergent properties, or global behaviors that result from local interactions but are difficult to reduce to their component parts. Numerous academic fields, including physics, biology, economics, and sociology, deal with complex systems. The brain's neural networks, ecosystems, social networks, financial markets, and even climate systems are a few examples. In this context, the main objective of statistical physics is to explain how microscopic interactions result in macroscopic properties like temperature, magnetization, or network connectivity. It accomplishes this by handling the numerous degrees of freedom present in complex systems using probabilistic techniques.
EPJ B Topical Issue - Quantum phase transitions and open quantum systems: A tribute to Prof. Amit Dutta
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- Published on 13 December 2024
Guest Editors: Uma Divakaran, Ferenc Iglói, Victor Mukherjee & Krishnendu Sengupta
Prof. Amit Dutta, a theoretical physicist working at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, passed away in the beginning of the year 2023, leaving a void in the quantum condensed matter community, and also among his friends, family and colleagues. He was well known for his works on dynamics of quantum phase transitions and for his excellent teaching abilities; more recently, he had started working on open quantum systems as well.
This special issue is a dedication to Amit, bringing together articles on the areas he worked, starting from different types of non-equilibrium quantum dynamics to open quantum systems.
All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 13 February 2025. For further information read the Editorial.EPJ B Highlight - Characterising shifts in Sicily’s seasonal rainfall
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- Published on 19 November 2024
Over the past decade, rainfall patterns on Sicily have shifted from a 4- to a 2-season cycle, reflecting similar shifts taking place worldwide.
Around the world, man-made climate change is increasing both the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Seasonal patterns in rainfall are an especially important indicator of these changes: while a lack of rain can lead to more severe droughts, an excess can trigger catastrophic events such as landslides and flash flooding. To better understand the impact of these risks, it is vital for researchers to characterise these changes in as much detail as possible.
Through new research published in EPJ B, researchers led by Vera Pecorino at the University of Catania, Italy, present a highly detailed analysis of recent changes in seasonal rainfall on the Italian island of Sicily. Their results confirm that over the past decade, the island’s rainfall patterns underwent a profound shift from a 4- to a 2-season cycle.
EPJ B Highlight - How did the COVID pandemic end so abruptly?
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- Published on 21 August 2024
New analysis suggests that a dramatic drop in deaths from COVID-19 between 2022 and 2023 could be attributed to an abrupt phase transition in the molecular structure of the virus’ spike protein.
During the winter of 2020 and 2021, the US saw deaths from COVID-19 reach 250,000. The following year, this number surged by a third to 330,000. But from August 2022 to March 2023, the number of deaths related to COVID-19 deaths plummeted to just 80,000, abruptly ending the COVID pandemic. This dramatic decline couldn’t be attributed solely to vaccines, which had been already widely available since Spring 2021.
Through new research published in EPJ B Marcelo Moret of CIMATEC in Brazil, together with James Phillips at Rutgers University, New Jersey, suggest that a phase transition in the molecular structure of the COVID-19 spike protein made the virus less likely to cause severe infections. Their results offer important insights into how the pandemic ended so quickly, and could help us to prepare for future pandemics.
EPJ B Highlight - Scheduling meetings: Are the odds in your favour?
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- Published on 14 August 2024
The results of an exploration of the mathematical theory behind Doodle polls that began in jest may be applicable to many other situations that require consensus-building.
If you often schedule meetings, you are likely to know how difficult it is to pick a time that suits everyone. Furthermore, the advent of tools like Doodle can make it harder: all too often, a poll will ‘fail’ with no mutually acceptable slot found. It would surely be useful to know the probability that a poll with a given number of participants and slots will generate a suitable time.
Three US-based theoretical physicists have now generated mathematical models of this problem and published them in EPJ B. “Our study began almost as a joke, when we were irritated by the growing number of polls we had to complete”, says first author Harsh Mathur from Case Western University, Cleveland, OH. “But we found that the models we produced were mathematically sophisticated and could be useful more widely.”
EPJ B Highlight - Assessing the environmental impacts of Brazil’s biofuel sector
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- Published on 13 August 2024
Mathematical analysis reveals that within Brazil’s agriculture and livestock industry, the biofuels sector is most heavily reliant on other sectors with high greenhouse gas emissions.
Brazil is a world leader in biofuel production, but the environmental sustainability of the sector has faced criticism due to its impacts on deforestation, water use, and biodiversity, especially in the Amazon rainforest.
Through analysis published in EPJ B, researchers led by Eder Johnson de Area Leão Pereira at the Federal Institute of Maranhão reveal new insights into the biofuel industry's dependence on high greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting sectors.
EPJ B Highlight - Thinking about the rise of brain-inspired computing
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- Published on 02 August 2024
A new review paper looks at the growing and interdisciplinary area of research that investigates how principles of the biological brain can be translated to computers.
The recent widespread and long-lasting chaos caused by Microsoft outages across the globe exemplifies just how integral computing has become to our lives. Yet, as computer hardware and software improve, arguably the most sophisticated and powerful computer we know of is still the human brain.
Sharing its computing power through billions of neurons interacting via trillions of synapses, the human brain doesn’t just compete with the most powerful supercomputers devised, but by consuming less energy than it takes to power the light in your fridge, your brain beats computers in the efficiency department, hands down.
It is little wonder that scientists and computer engineers are inspired by the human brain when it comes to devising new computing methods.
In a new paper published in the journal EPJ B, Mohamadreza Zolfagharinejad from the University of Twente and his coauthors discuss the rise of brain-inspired computing, its burgeoning demand, and its importance in the modern world. The review offers a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in brain-inspired computing hardware.
EPJ B Highlight - Five ways to model text using networks
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- Published on 02 August 2024
Network theory can be used in different ways to model the relationship between words in a block of text, linking analytical patterns to coherence and to some more subjective aspects of writing quality.
The explosive growth of AI ‘chatbots’ over the last few years and their ability to generate text that simulates human writing, often very accurately, has focused attention on how text is structured.
One useful way of analysing text is to think of it as a network, and methods of network analysis that are familiar to mathematicians and computer scientists can be powerful in linguistics. Davi Alves Oliveira and Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira from the University of Bahia State, Bahia, Brazil have compared five methods of representing sentences as networks, showing that each has value for specific applications. This analysis has now been published in the journal EPJ B.
EPJ B Topical review - Twenty-five years of random asset exchange modeling
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- Published on 05 June 2024
Over the last twenty-five years, there has emerged within the subfield of econophysics a sizeable and important literature (hereinafter the “random asset exchange” literature) concerned with the application of stochastic processes to model wealth and income distributions. In a new Topical Review published in EPJ B, written by Max Greenberg (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA) and H. Oliver Gao (Cornell University, USA), the random asset exchange literature as a whole is comprehensively exposited for the first time.
