Monday, June 23, 2014

Equations reveal the rebellious rhythms at the heart of nature

Equations reveal the rebellious rhythms at the heart of nature: Physicists Dmytro Iatsenko , Professor Peter McClintock, and Professor Aneta Stefanovska, have reported a far more general solution of the Kuramoto equations than anyone has achieved previously, with some quite unexpected results.

One surprise is that the oscillators can form "glassy" states, where they adjust the tempos of their rhythms but otherwise remain uncoordinated with each other, thus giving birth to some kind of "synchronous disorder" rather like the disordered molecular structure of window glass. Furthermore and even more astonishingly, under certain circumstances the oscillators can behave in a totally independent manner despite being tightly coupled together, the phenomenon the authors call "super-relaxation".

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