arXiv subjects

Jerome Benoit

Publications and source records attributed to Jerome Benoit.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2019

On Equilibrium Metropolis Simulations on Self-Organized Urban Street Networks

Urban street networks of unplanned or self-organized cities typically exhibit astonishing scale-free patterns. This scale-freeness can be shown, within the maximum entropy formalism (MaxEnt), as the manifestation of a fluctuating system that preserves on average some amount of information. Monte Carlo methods that can further this perspective are cruelly missing. Here we adapt to self-organized urban street networks the Metropolis algorithm. The "coming to equilibrium" distribution is established with MaxEnt by taking scale-freeness as prior hypothesis along with symmetry-conservation arguments. The equilibrium parameter is the scaling; its concomitant extensive quantity is, assuming our lack of knowledge, an amount of information. To design an ergodic dynamics, we disentangle the state-of-the-art street generating paradigms based on nonoverlapping walks into layout-at-junction dynamics. Our adaptation reminisces the single-spin-flip Metropolis algorithm for Ising models. We thus expect Metropolis simulations to reveal that self-organized urban street networks, besides sustaining scale-freeness over a wide range of scalings, undergo a crossover as scaling varies -- literature argues for a small-world crossover. Simulations for Central London are consistent against the state-of-the-art outputs over a realistic range of scaling exponents. Our illustrative Watts-Strogatz phase diagram with scaling as rewiring parameter demonstrates a small-world crossover curving within the realistic window 2-3; it also shows that the state-of-the-art outputs underlie relatively large worlds. Our Metropolis adaptation to self-organized urban street networks thusly appears as a scaling variant of the Watts-Strogatz model. Such insights may ultimately allow the urban profession to anticipate self-organization or unplanned evolution of urban street networks.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

On the Metropolis Algorithm for Urban Street Networks

The complexity of urban street networks is well accepted to reside in the information space where roads map to nodes and junctions to links between nodes. Assuming that information networks preserve their amount of surprisal on average leads us to adapt the single-flip Metropolis algorithm to compute information networks with minimal amounts of surprisal.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

On the Perturbation of Self-Organized Urban Street Networks

We investigate urban street networks as a whole within the frameworks of information physics and statistical physics. Urban street networks are envisaged as evolving social systems subject to a Boltzmann-mesoscopic entropy conservation. For self-organized urban street networks, our paradigm has already allowed us to recover the effectively observed scale-free distribution of roads and to foresee the distribution of junctions. The entropy conservation is interpreted as the conservation of the surprisal of the city-dwellers for their urban street network. In view to extend our investigations to other urban street networks, we consider to perturb our model for self-organized urban street networks by adding an external surprisal drift. We obtain the statistics for slightly drifted self-organized urban street networks. Besides being practical and manageable, this statistics separates the macroscopic evolution scale parameter from the mesoscopic social parameters. This opens the door to observational investigations on the universality of the evolution scale parameter. Ultimately, we argue that the strength of the external surprisal drift might be an indicator for the disengagement of the city-dwellers for their city.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Structure Entropy, Self-Organization, and Power Laws in Urban Street Networks: Evidence for Alexander's Ideas

Easy and intuitive navigability is of central importance in cities. The actual scale-free networking of urban street networks in their topological space, where navigation information is encoded by mapping roads to nodes and junctions to links between nodes, has still no simple explanation. Emphasizing the road-junction hierarchy in a holistic and systematic way leads us to envisage urban street networks as evolving social systems subject to a Boltzmann-mesoscopic entropy conservation. This conservation, which we may interpret in terms of surprisal, ensures the passage from the road-junction hierarchy to a scale-free coherence. To wit, we recover the actual scale-free probability distribution for natural roads in self-organized cities. We obtain this passage by invoking Jaynes's Maximum Entropy principle (statistical physics), while we capitalize on modern ideas of quantification (information physics) and well known results on structuration (lattice theory) to measure the information network entropy. The emerging paradigm, which applies to systems with more intricate hierarchies as actual cities, appears to reflect well the influential ideas on cities of the urbanist Christopher Alexander.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

On the Statistics of Urban Street Networks

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2013

Pair Approximation Models for Disease Spread

We consider a Susceptible-Infective-Recovered (SIR) model, where the mechanism for the renewal of susceptibles is demographic, on a ring with next nearest neighbour interactions, and a family of correlated pair approximations (CPA), parametrized by a measure of the relative contributions of loops and open triplets of the sites involved in the infection process. We have found that the phase diagram of the CPA, at fixed coordination number, changes qualitatively as the relative weight of the loops increases, from the phase diagram of the uncorrelated pair approximation to phase diagrams typical of one-dimensional systems. In addition, we have performed computer simulations of the same model and shown that while the CPA with a constant correlation parameter cannot describe the global behaviour of the model, a reasonable description of the endemic equilibria as well as of the phase diagram may be obtained by allowing the parameter to depend on the demographic rate.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2007

Spherical Vesicles Distorted by a Grafted Latex Bead: An Exact Solution

We present an exact solution to the problem of the global shape description of a spherical vesicle distorted by a grafted latex bead. This solution is derived by treating the nonlinearity in bending elasticity through the (topological) Bogomol'nyi decomposition technique and elastic compatibility. We recover the ``hat-model'' approximation in the limit of a small latex bead and find that the region antipodal to the grafted latex bead flattens. We also derive the appropriate shape equation using the variational principle and relevant constraints.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2003

Self-Dual Bending Theory for Vesicles

We present a self-dual bending theory that may enable a better understanding of highly nonlinear global behavior observed in biological vesicles. Adopting this topological approach for spherical vesicles of revolution allows us to describe them as frustrated sine-Gordon kinks. Finally, to illustrate an application of our results, we consider a spherical vesicle globally distorted by two polar latex beads.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2001

Bogomol'nyi Decomposition for Vesicles of Arbitrary Genus

We apply the Bogomol'nyi technique, which is usually invoked in the study of solitons or models with topological invariants, to the case of elastic energy of vesicles. We show that spontaneous bending contribution caused by any deformation from metastable bending shapes falls in two distinct topological sets: shapes of spherical topology and shapes of non-spherical topology experience respectively a deviatoric bending contribution a la Fischer and a mean curvature bending contribution a la Helfrich. In other words, topology may be considered to describe bending phenomena. Besides, we calculate the bending energy per genus and the bending closure energy regardless of the shape of the vesicle. As an illustration we briefly consider geometrical frustration phenomena experienced by magnetically coated vesicles.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2001

A Uniform Approach to Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Spins on Low Dimensional Lattices

Using group theoretical methods we show for both the triangular and square lattices that in the continuum limit the antiferromagnetic order parameter lives on SO3 without respect of the initial lattice. For the antiferromagnetic chain we recover the Haldane decomposition. This order parameter interacts with a local gauge field rather than with a global one as implicitly suggested in the literature which in our approach appears in a rather natural manner. In fact this merely corresponds to a novel extension of the spin group by a local gauge field. This analysis based on the real division algebras applies to low dimensional lattices.

math-ph↗

arXiv2001

Heisenberg Spins on a Cylinder Section

Classical Heisenberg spins in the continuum limit (i.e. the nonlinear sigma-model) are studied on an elastic cylinder section with homogeneous boundary conditions. The latter may serve as a physical realization of magnetically coated microtubules and cylindrical membranes. The corresponding rigid cylinder model exhibits topological soliton configurations with geometrical frustration due to the finite length of the cylinder section. Assuming small and smooth deformations allows to find shapes of the elastic support by relaxing the rigidity constraint: an inhomogeneous Lamé equation arises. Finally, this leads to a novel geometric effect: a global shrinking of the cylinder section with swellings.

cond-mat↗

arXiv1999

Symmetry, Geometry, Topology and Spin: Heisenberg spins in the continuum limit/magnetic vesicles

In this thesis I present my research on the exotic configurations of antiferromagnetic systems characterised by a topological invariant. The research presented outlines the construction of novel local antiferromagnetic degrees of freedom for low dimensional antiferromagnetic lattices. This new construction reproduces the real division algebra hierarchy satisfied by the nonlinear sigma-model and reveals the presence of a novel local gauge field. I have also studied elastic magnetic vesicles of spherical and toric genus in the presence of a magnetic soliton. My studies reveal a global shrinking, with local swellings in the regions where the soliton presents a spin-flip. The geometrical origin of this novel phenomena led me to interpret the geometric frustration of magnetic vesicles as the competition between the two topological orders present. The microscopic mechanism and topological competition suggested above go beyond the scope of this thesis, providing a microscopic explanation for the Fermi-Bose transmutation and a way to deal with this type of exotic physics.

cond-mat↗

arXiv1998

Heisenberg Spins on an Elastic Torus Section

Classical Heisenberg spins in the continuum limit (i.e. the nonlinear sigma-model) are studied on an elastic torus section with homogeneous boundary conditions. The corresponding rigid model exhibits topological soliton configurations with geometrical frustration due to the torus eccentricity. Assuming small and smooth deformations allows to find shapes of the elastic support by relaxing the rigidity constraint: an inhomogeneous Lamé equation arises. Finally, this leads to a novel geometric effect: a global shrinking with swellings.

cond-mat↗