The response of an ecosystem to external drivers may not always be gradual and reversible. Discontinuous and sometimes irreversible changes, called ‘regime shifts’ or ‘critical transitions’, can occur. The likelihood of such shifts is expected to increase for a variety of ecosystems, and it is difficult to predict how close an ecosystem is to a critical transition. Recent modelling studies iden...

The coil-bridge transition in a self-avoiding lattice chain with one end fixed at height H above the attractive planar surface is investigated by theory and Monte Carlo simulation. We focus on the details of the first-order phase transition between the coil state at large height H ⩾ Htr and a bridge state at H ⩽ Htr, where Htr corresponds to the coil-bridge transition point. The equilibrium pro...

We present a cascading failure model of two interdependent networks in which functional nodes belong to components of size greater than or equal to s. We find theoretically and via simulation that in complex networks with random dependency links the transition is first order for s≥3 and continuous for s=2. We also study interdependent lattices with a distance constraint r in the dependency link...

The deconfinement phase transition at high baryon densities and low temperatures evades a direct investigation by means of lattice gauge calculations. In order to make this regime of QCD accessible by computer simulations, two proposal are made: (i) A Lattice Effective Theory (LET) is designed which incorporates gluon and diquark fields. The deconfinement transition takes place when the diquark...

We study the properties of the phase transition in three dimensional U(1)+Higgs theory or Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity. Special attention is paid to large values of scalar self coupling (Type II superconductors), where the nature of the transition is unclear. We present some evidence for an unusual transition in this regime.

The evolution from the metallic (or plasmonic) to molecular state in metal nanoparticles constitutes a central question in nanoscience research because of its importance in revealing the origin of metallic bonding and offering fundamental insights into the birth of surface plasmon resonance. Previous research has not been able to probe the transition due to the unavailability of atomically prec...

We investigate the effect of counterion fluctuations in a single polyelectrolyte brush in the absence of added salt by systematically expanding the counterion free energy about Poisson-Boltzmann mean-field theory. We find that for strongly charged brushes, there is a collapse regime in which the brush height decreases with increasing charge on the polyelectrolyte chains. The transition to this ...

In this article a mathematical framework is introduced and explored for the study of processes in societal transitions. A transition is conceptualised as a fundamental shift in the functioning of a societal system. The framework views functioning as a real-valued field defined upon a real variable. The initial status quo prior to a transition is captured in a field called the regime and the alt...