The online talk by Christian Bick will take place on July 29 at 2 PM (CET) via Zoom.
If you would like to attend, please email office@csh.ac.at.
Title: “A Universal Route to Explosive Phenomena”
Abstract:
Critical transitions are observed in many complex systems. This includes the onset of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators or the emergence of an epidemic state within a population. “Explosive” first-order transitions have caught particular attention in a variety of systems when classical models are generalized by incorporating additional effects.
Here, we give a mathematical argument that the emergence of these first-order transitions is not surprising but rather a universally expected effect: Varying a classical model along a generic two-parameter family must lead to a change of criticality.
To illustrate our framework, we give three explicit examples of the effect in distinct physical systems: a model of adaptive epidemic dynamics, for a generalization of the Kuramoto model, and for a percolation transition.
About:
Christian Bick received his Diploma in mathematics from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany) in 2008. After a year at the University of California, San Diego (USA), he completed his PhD work at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen to obtain his doctorate in mathematics from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2012. After a postdoctoral appointment at Rice University (USA) in 2013-2014, he came to the University of Exeter (UK) as a Marie Curie Fellow (IEF) in 2015. He held faculty positions at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford (2016-2017), the University of Exeter (2018-2020), and now the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.