arXiv subjects

Dan Gorbonos

Publications and source records attributed to Dan Gorbonos.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Geometrical Structure of Bifurcations during Spatial Decision-Making

Animals must constantly make decisions on the move, such as when choosing among multiple options, or "targets", in space. Recent evidence suggests that this results from a recursive feedback between the (vectorial) neural representation of the targets and the resulting motion defined by this consensus, which then changes the egocentric neural representation of the the options, and so on. Here we employ a simple model of this process to both explore how its dynamics account for the experimentally-observed abruptly-branching trajectories exhibited by animals during spatial decision-making, and to provide new insights into spatiotemporal computation. Essential neural dynamics, notably local excitation and long-range inhibition, are captured in our model via spin-system dynamics, with groups of Ising-spins representing neural "activity bumps" corresponding to target directions. Analysis, employing a novel "mean-field trajectory" approach, reveals the nature of the spontaneous symmetry breaking - bifurcations in the model that result in literal bifurcations in trajectory space and how it results in new geometric principles for spatiotemporal decision-making. We find that all bifurcation points, beyond the very first, fall on a small number of "bifurcation curves". It is the spatial organization of these curves that is shown to be key to determining the shape of the trajectories, such as self-similar or space filling, exhibited during decision-making, irrespective of the trajectory's starting point. Furthermore, we find that a non-Euclidean representation of space considerably reduces the number of bifurcation points in many geometrical configurations, preventing endless indecision and promoting effective spatial decision-making. This suggests that a non-Euclidean neural representation of space may be expected to have evolved across species in order to facilitate spatial decision-making.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Models of Animal Behavior as Active Particle Systems with Nonreciprocal Interactions

Active particle systems of interacting self-propelled particles offer a versatile framework for modeling complex systems. When employed to describe aspects of animal behavior, the complexity of animal movement and decision-making often requires the use of unique types of effective interactions between the particles -- notably nonreciprocal effective forces that do not obey the usual conservation laws of Newtonian mechanics. Here we review two recent empirically-motivated models, of two very different types of animal behavior, where the behavior is described in terms of active particles which interact through nonreciprocal effective forces. The first model describes the dynamics of animal contests, wherein typically two rivals fight over a localized resource. The uniquely shaped effective potentials between the model's 'contestant particles' manifest the adversarial nature of contest interactions and capture the dynamical essence of contest behavior in space and time. The second model describes the stabilization of cohesive swarms through long-range and adaptive gravity-like attraction. This 'adaptive gravity' model explains the observed mass and velocity profiles of laboratory midge swarms. These examples demonstrate that theoretical models that use the framework of active particles to describe animal behavior can expand the scope of active-particle research, as well as explain complex phenomena in animal behavior.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2023

An Effective Hydrodynamic Description of Marching Locusts

A fundamental question in complex systems is how to relate interactions between individual components ("microscopic description") to the global properties of the system ("macroscopic description"). Another fundamental question is whether such a macroscopic description exists at all and how well it describes the large-scale properties. Here, we address these questions using as a canonical example of a self-organizing complex system - the collective motion of desert locusts. One of the world's most devastating insect plagues begins when flightless juvenile locusts form "marching bands". Moving through semiarid habitats in the search for food, these bands display remarkable coordinated motion. We investigated how well physical models can describe the flow of locusts within a band. For this, we filmed locusts within marching bands during an outbreak in Kenya and automatically tracked all individuals passing through the camera frame. We first analysed the spatial topology of nearest neighbors and found individuals to be isotropically distributed. Despite this apparent randomness, a local order was observed in regions of high density with a clear second neighbor peak in the radial distribution function, akin to an ordered fluid. Furthermore, reconstructing individual locust trajectories revealed a highly-aligned movement, consistent with the one-dimensional version of the Toner-Tu equations, which are a generalization of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluids, used to describe the equivalent macroscopic fluid properties of active particles. Using this effective Toner-Tu equation, which relates the gradient of the pressure to the acceleration, we show that the effective "pressure" of locusts increases as a linear function of density in segments with highest polarization. Our study thus demonstrates an effective hydrodynamic description of flow dynamics in plague locust swarms.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2023

A simple cognitive model explains movement decisions during schooling in zebrafish

While moving, animals must frequently make decisions about their future travel direction, whether they are alone or in a group. Here we investigate this process for zebrafish (Danio rerio), which naturally move in cohesive groups. Employing state-of-the-art virtual reality, we study how real fish follow one or several moving, virtual conspecifics. These data are used to inform, and test, a model of social response that includes a process of explicit decision-making, whereby the fish can decide which of the virtual conspecifics to follow, or to follow some average direction. This approach is in contrast with previous models where the direction of motion was based on a continuous computation, such as directional averaging. Building upon a simplified version of this model [Sridhar et al. 2021], which was limited to a one-dimensional projection of the fish motion, we present here a model that describes the motion of the real fish as it swims freely in two-dimensions. Motivated by experimental observations, the swim speed of the fish in this model uses a burst-and-coast swimming pattern, with the burst frequency being dependent on the distance of the fish from the followed conspecific(s). We demonstrate that this model is able to explain the observed spatial distribution of the real fish behind the virtual conspecifics in the experiments. In particular, the model naturally explains the observed critical bifurcations for a freely swimming fish, whenever the fish makes a decision to follow only one of the virtual conspecifics, instead of following them as an averaged group. This model can provide the foundation for modeling a cohesive shoal of swimming fish, while explicitly describing their directional decision-making process at the individual level

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2020

Pair Formation in Insect Swarms Driven by Adaptive Long-Range Interactions

In swarms of flying insects, the motions of individuals are largely uncoordinated with those of their neighbors, unlike the highly ordered motion of bird flocks. However, it has been observed that insects may transiently form pairs with synchronized relative motion while moving through the swarm. The origin of this phenomenon remains an open question. In particular, it is not known if pairing is a new behavioral process or whether it is a natural byproduct of typical swarming behavior. Here, using an "adaptive-gravity" model that proposes that insects interact via long-range gravity-like acoustic attractions that are modulated by the total background sound (via "adaptivity" or fold-change detection) and that reproduces measured features of real swarms, we show that pair formation can indeed occur without the introduction of additional behavioral rules. In the model, pairs form robustly whenever two insects happen to move together from the center of the swarm (where the background sound is high) toward the swarm periphery (where the background sound is low). Due to adaptivity, the attraction between the pair increases as the background sound decreases, thereby forming a bound state since their relative kinetic energy is smaller than their pair-potential energy. When the pair moves into regions of high background sound, however, the process is reversed and the pair may break up. Our results suggest that pairing should appear generally in biological systems with long-range attraction and adaptive sensing, such as during chemotaxis-driven cellular swarming.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2019

Similarities between Insect Swarms and Isothermal Globular Clusters

Previous work has suggested that disordered swarms of flying insects can be well modeled as self-gravitating systems, as long as the "gravitational" interaction is adaptive. Motivated by this work we compare the predictions of the classic, mean-field King model for isothermal globular clusters to observations of insect swarms. Detailed numerical simulations of regular and adaptive gravity allow us to expose the features of the swarms' density profiles that are captured by the King model phenomenology, and those that are due to adaptivity and short-range repulsion. Our results provide further support for adaptive gravity as a model for swarms.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2017

Stable Swarming Using Adaptive Long-range Interactions

Sensory mechanisms in biology, from cells to humans, have the property of adaptivity, whereby the response produced by the sensor is adapted to the overall amplitude of the signal; reducing the sensitivity in the presence of strong stimulus, while increasing it when it is weak. This property is inherently energy consuming and a manifestation of the non-equilibrium nature of living organisms. We explore here how adaptivity affects the effective forces that organisms feel due to others in the context of a uniform swarm, both in two and three dimensions. The interactions between the individuals are taken to be attractive and long-range, of power-law form. We find that the effects of adaptivity inside the swarm are dramatic, where the effective forces decrease (or remain constant) with increasing swarm density. Linear stability analysis demonstrates how this property prevents collapse (Jeans instability), when the forces are adaptive. Adaptivity therefore endows swarms with a natural mechanism for self-stabilization.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2015

Long-range Acoustic Interactions in Insect Swarms: An Adaptive Gravity Model

The collective motion of groups of animals emerges from the net effect of the interactions between individual members of the group. In many cases, such as birds, fish, or ungulates, these interactions are mediated by sensory stimuli that predominantly arise from nearby neighbors. But not all stimuli in animal groups are short range. Here, we consider mating swarms of midges, which interact primarily via long-range acoustic stimuli. We exploit the similarity in form between the decay of acoustic and gravitational sources to build a model for swarm behavior. By accounting for the adaptive nature of the midges' acoustic sensing, we show that our "adaptive gravity" model makes mean-field predictions that agree well with experimental observations of laboratory swarms. Our results highlight the role of sensory mechanisms and interaction range in collective animal behavior. The adaptive interactions that we present here open a new class of equations of motion, which may appear in other biological contexts.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2013

A Wald-like Formula for Energy

We present a simple "Wald-like" formula for gravitational energy about a constant curvature background spacetime. The formula is derived following the Abbott-Deser-Tekin approach for the definition of conserved asymptotic charges in higher-derivative gravity.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2011

Evaluating the Wald Entropy from two-derivative terms in quadratic actions

We evaluate the Wald Noether charge entropy for a black hole in generalized theories of gravity. Expanding the Lagrangian to second order in gravitational perturbations, we show that contributions to the entropy density originate only from the coefficients of two-derivative terms. The same considerations are extended to include matter fields and to show that arbitrary powers of matter fields and their symmetrized covariant derivatives cannot contribute to the entropy density. We also explain how to use the linearized gravitational field equation rather than quadratic actions to obtain the same results. Several explicit examples are presented that allow us to clarify subtle points in the derivation and application of our method.

hep-th↗

arXiv2010

The Noether charge entropy in anti-deSitter space and its field theory dual

We express the Noether charge entropy density of a black brane in anti-deSitter space in terms of local operators in the anti-deSitter space bulk. We find that Wald's expression for the Noether charge entropy needs to be modified away from the horizon by an additional term that vanishes on the horizon. We then determine the field theory dual of the Noether charge entropy for theories that asymptote to Einstein theory. We do so by calculating the value of the entropy density at the anti-deSitter space boundary and applying the standard rules of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We interpret the variation of the entropy density operator from the horizon to the boundary as due to the renormalization of the effective gravitational couplings as they flow from the ultra-violet to the infra-red. We discuss the cases of Einstein-Hilbert theory and f(R) theories in detail and make general comments about more complicated cases.

hep-th↗

arXiv2010

The Weak Gravity Conjecture and the Viscosity Bound with Six-Derivative Corrections

The weak gravity conjecture and the shear viscosity to entropy density bound place constraints on low energy effective field theories that may help to distinguish which theories can be UV completed. Recently, there have been suggestions of a possible correlation between the two constraints. In some interesting cases, the behavior was precisely such that the conjectures were mutually exclusive. Motivated by these works, we study the mass to charge and shear viscosity to entropy density ratios for charged AdS5 black branes, which are holographically dual to four-dimensional CFTs at finite temperature. We study a family of four-derivative and six-derivative perturbative corrections to these backgrounds. We identify the region in parameter space where the two constraints are satisfied and in particular find that the inclusion of the next-to-leading perturbative correction introduces wider possibilities for the satisfaction of both constraints.

hep-th↗

arXiv2010

Fundamental Strings and Higher Derivative Corrections to d-Dimensional Black Holes

We study aspects of d-dimensional black holes with two electric charges, corresponding to fundamental strings with generic momentum and winding on an internal circle. The perturbative alpha' corrections to such black holes and their gravitational thermodynamics are obtained. The latter are derived using the Euclidean approach and the Wald formula for the entropy. We find that the entropy and the charge/mass ratio of black holes increase in alpha' for any mass and charges, and in all dimensions.

hep-th↗

arXiv2009

Wald's entropy is equal to a quarter of the horizon area in units of the effective gravitational coupling

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes in Einstein's theory of gravity is equal to a quarter of the horizon area in units of Newton's constant. Wald has proposed that in general theories of gravity the entropy of stationary black holes with bifurcate Killing horizons is a Noether charge which is in general different from the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. We show that the Noether charge entropy is equal to a quarter of the horizon area in units of the effective gravitational coupling on the horizon defined by the coefficient of the kinetic term of specific graviton polarizations on the horizon. We present several explicit examples of static spherically symmetric black holes.

hep-th↗

arXiv2009

A Toy Model for Topology Change Transitions: Role of Curvature Corrections

We consider properties of near-critical solutions describing a test static axisymmetric D-dimensional brane interacting with a bulk N-dimensional black hole (N>D). We focus our attention on the effects connected with curvature corrections to the brane action. Namely, we demonstrate that the second order phase transition in such a system is modified and becomes first order. We discuss possible consequences of these results for merger transitions between caged black holes and black strings.

hep-th↗

arXiv2007

High and Low Dimensions in The Black Hole Negative Mode

The negative mode of the Schwarzschild black hole is central to Euclidean quantum gravity around hot flat space and for the Gregory-Laflamme black string instability. We analyze the eigenvalue as a function of space-time dimension by constructing two perturbative expansions: one for large d and the other for small d-3, and determining as many coefficients as we are able to compute analytically. Joining the two expansions we obtain an interpolating rational function accurate to better than 2% through the whole range of dimensions including d=4.

hep-th↗

arXiv2007

A Simplified Mathematical Model for the Formation of Null Singularities Inside Black Holes I - Basic Formulation and a Conjecture

Einstein's equations are known to lead to the formation of black holes and spacetime singularities. This appears to be a manifestation of the mathematical phenomenon of finite-time blowup: a formation of singularities from regular initial data. We present a simple hyperbolic system of two semi-linear equations inspired by the Einstein equations. We explore a class of solutions to this system which are analogous to static black-hole models. These solutions exhibit a black-hole structure with a finite-time blowup on a characteristic line mimicking the null inner horizon of spinning or charged black holes. We conjecture that this behavior - namely black-hole formation with blow-up on a characteristic line - is a generic feature of our semi-linear system. Our simple system may provide insight into the formation of null singularities inside spinning or charged black holes in the full system of Einstein equations.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2006

A Simplified Mathematical Model for the Formation of Null Singularities Inside Black Holes II

We study a simple system of two hyperbolic semi-linear equations, inspired by the Einstein equations. The system, which was introduced in gr-qc/0612136, is a model for singularity formation inside black holes. We show for a particular case of the equations that the system demonstrates a finite time blowup. The singularity that is formed is a null singularity. Then we show that in this particular case the singularity has features that are analogous to known features of models of black-hole interiors - which describe the inner-horizon instability. Our simple system may provide insight into the formation of null singularities inside spinning or charged black holes.

gr-qc↗