Epidemic growth and Griffiths effects on an emergent network of excited atoms

T. M. Wintermantel, M. Buchhold, S. Shevate, M. Morgado, Y. Wang, G. Lochead, S. Diehl and S. Whitlock ()
Additional contact information
T. M. Wintermantel: Universität Heidelberg
M. Buchhold: Universität zu Köln
S. Shevate: ISIS (UMR 7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS
M. Morgado: ISIS (UMR 7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS
Y. Wang: ISIS (UMR 7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS
G. Lochead: ISIS (UMR 7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS
S. Diehl: Universität zu Köln
S. Whitlock: ISIS (UMR 7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract Whether it be physical, biological or social processes, complex systems exhibit dynamics that are exceedingly difficult to understand or predict from underlying principles. Here we report a striking correspondence between the excitation dynamics of a laser driven gas of Rydberg atoms and the spreading of diseases, which in turn opens up a controllable platform for studying non-equilibrium dynamics on complex networks. The competition between facilitated excitation and spontaneous decay results in sub-exponential growth of the excitation number, which is empirically observed in real epidemics. Based on this we develop a quantitative microscopic susceptible-infected-susceptible model which links the growth and final excitation density to the dynamics of an emergent heterogeneous network and rare active region effects associated to an extended Griffiths phase. This provides physical insights into the nature of non-equilibrium criticality in driven many-body systems and the mechanisms leading to non-universal power-laws in the dynamics of complex systems.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20333-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-20333-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20333-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().