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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3008-5258

AccessType

Open Access Dissertation

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Physics

Year Degree Awarded

2021

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Donald Towsley

Subject Categories

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Condensed Matter Physics | Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics

Abstract

This dissertation is devoted to the study and analysis of different types of emergent behavior in physical systems. Emergence is a phenomenon that has fascinated researchers from various fields of science and engineering. From the emergence of global pandemics to the formation of reaction-diffusion patterns, the main feature that connects all these diverse systems is the appearance of a complex global structure as a result of collective interactions of simple underlying components. This dissertation will focus on two types of emergence in physical systems: emergence of long-range connectivity in networks and emergence and analysis of complex patterns. The most prominent theory which deals with the emergence of long-range connectivity is the percolation theory. This dissertation employs many concepts from the percolation theory to study connectivity transitions in various systems. Ordinary percolation theory is founded upon two main assumptions, namely locality and independence of the underlying components. In Chapters 2 and 3, we relax these assumptions in different manners and show that relaxing these assumptions leads to irregular behaviors such as appearance of different universality classes and, in some instances, violation of universality. Chapter 2 deals with relaxing the assumption of locality of interactions. In this Chapter, we define a hierarchy of various measures of robust connectivity. We study the phase transition of these robustness metrics as a function of site/bond occupation/removal probability on the square lattice. Furthermore, we perform extensive numerical analysis and extract these robustness metrics' critical thresholds and critical behaviors. We show that some of these robustness metrics do not fall under the regular percolation universality class. The extensive numerical results in this work can serve as a foundation for any researcher who aims to design/study various degrees of connectivity in networks. In Chapter 3, we study the non-equilibrium phase transition of long-range connectivity in a multi-particle interacting system on the square lattice. The interactions between different particles translate to relaxing the assumption of independence in the percolation theory. Using extensive numerical simulations, we show that the phase transition observed in this system violates the regular concept of universality. However, it conforms well with the concept of weak-universality recently introduced in the literature. We observe that by varying inter-particle interaction strength in our model, one can control the critical behavior of this phase transition. These observations could be pivotal in studying phase transitions and universality classes. Chapter 4 focuses on the analysis of reaction-diffusion patterns. We utilize a multitude of machine learning algorithms to analyze reaction-diffusion patterns. In particular, we address two main problems using these techniques, namely, pattern regression and pattern classification. Given an observed instance of a pattern with a known generative function, in the pattern regression task, we aim to predict the specific set of reaction-diffusion parameters (i.e. diffusion constant) which can reproduce the observed pattern. We employ supervised learning techniques to successfully solve this problem and show the performance of our model in some real-world instances. We also address the task of pattern classification. In this task, we are interested in grouping different instances of similar patterns together. This task is usually performed visually by the researcher studying certain natural phenomena. However, this method is tedious and can be inconsistent among different researchers. We utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to classify patterns of the Gray-Scott model. We show that our methods show outstanding performance both in supervised and unsupervised settings. The methods introduced in this Chapter could bridge the gaps between researchers studying patterns in different fields of science and engineering.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/24491453

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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