The emerging subfield of econophysics explores the degree to which certain concepts and methods from statistical physics can be appropriately modified and adapted to provide new insights into questions that have been the focus of interest in the economics community. Here we give a brief overview...

One challenge of biology, medicine, and economics is that the systems treated by these serious scientific disciplines have no perfect metronome in time and no perfect spatial architecture—crystalline or otherwise. Nonetheless, as if by magic, out of nothing but randomness one finds remarkably...

We discuss the hypothesis that, in addition to the known critical point in water (below which two fluid phases — a lower-density gas and a higher-density liquid — coexist), there exists a “second” critical point at low temperatures (below which two liquid phases — a higher-density...

The purpose of this talk is to present a brief overview of our group's recent research into dynamic mechanisms of disorderly growth, an exciting new branch of condensed matter physics in which the methods and concepts of modern statistical mechanics are proving to be useful. Our strategy has...

We consider a Lévy flyer of order α that starts from a point x0 on an interval [0,L] with absorbing boundaries. We find a closed-form expression for an arbitrary average quantity, characterizing the trajectory of the flyer, such as mean first passage time, average total path length,...

Although H2O has been the topic of considerable research since the beginning of the century, the peculiar physical properties are still not well understood. We discuss recent experiments and simulations relating to the hypothesis that, in addition to the known critical point in water, there...

We study the effect of particle size-dispersity on solids and melting of solids by molecular dynamics simulation on a two-dimensional size-dispersed Lennard-Jones system. We find that size-dispersity disfavours solidification and on increasing the dispersity, the solid ‘melts’, at a critical...

In this work we investigate the distribution of shortest paths in percolation systems at the percolation threshhold in two dimensions (2D). We study paths from one given point to multiple other points. In oil recovery terminology, the given single point can be mapped to an injection well...

The purpose of this opening talk is to describe examples of recent progress in applying statistical mechanics to biological systems. We first briefly review several biological systems, and then focus on the fractal features characterized by the long-range correlations found recently in DNA...

Using Monte-Carlo simulations, we find the continuum percolation threshold of a three-dimensional mixture of spheres of two different sizes. We fix the value of r, the ratio of the volume of the smaller sphere to the volume of the larger sphere, and determine the percolation threshold for...