AG Thiele - Self-Organization and Complexity

Two working groups from theoretical non-linear physics have reason to celebrate: under the leadership of Prof. Thiele and Prof. Gurevich, groundbreaking scientific work was recently published independently in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters.

Together with an international collaboration, Thomas Seidel presented a study entitled “Multistable Kuramoto Splay States in a Crystal of Mode-Locked Laser Pulses”. This work investigates mode-locked lasers using theoretical and experimental methods and describes multistable states in the phase relations of the pulses. The research team shows how they are linked to optical frequency combs and provides experimental evidence. These findings offer new perspectives for applications in high-precision spectroscopy and photonics.

Daniel Greve, on the other hand, investigated the interactions between non-reciprocity and conservation laws in active multicomponent systems in his work “Coexistence of Uniform and Oscillatory States Resulting from Nonreciprocity and Conservation Laws”. The results demonstrate that such systems not only allow stable uniform and oscillatory states, but also their coexistence. In certain cases, this coexistence can be described and predicted by a generalized Maxwell construction.

Both works impressively demonstrate how nonlinear methods broaden and deepen our understanding of complex physical systems.

Publications:
T. Seidel, A. Bartolo, A. Garnache, M. Giudici, M. Marconi, S. Gurevich, and J. Javaloyes, Physical Review Letters 134, 033801 (2025).
D. Greve, G. Lovato, T. Frohoff-Hülsmann, and U. Thiele, Physical Review Letters 134, 018303 (2025).

We congratulate Martin Heßler (AG Thiele, Supervisor Oliver Kamps) on winning the Poster Award
from the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division (SOE) of the German Physical Society
(DPG). The SOE rapidly evolved from a working group into its own specialist group within the
DPG, whose members focus on the application and further development of physical methods for the
analysis, modeling, simulation, and optimization of socio-economic systems. One of three awards,
consisting of an official certificate and a voucher worth one hundred euros, was awarded to Mr.
Heßler by Philipp Hövel (Chair of SOE), Eckehard Olbrich, and Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad (Co-Chairs
of SOE) at this year's DPG Spring Conference in Berlin for Mr. Heßler's outstanding poster
presentation entitled "Quantifying Tipping Risks in Power Grids and beyond." The data-driven
modeling proposed therein aims to resolve risks of destabilization in power grids on both
deterministic and stochastic time scales simultaneously. A direct application of the methodology to
data from a historical blackout event in the USA shows that the approach significantly contributes
to a deeper understanding of the dynamics preceding a failure of the examined power grid and that
previously discussed continuous destabilization processes fall short. In principle, the presented
methods are also applicable to systems from other fields of research.

 

A research article that was authored by members of the ITP was selected as a feature paper in the journal "Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science". The article "Cooperation in a non-ergodic world on a network - insurance and beyond" by Tobias Wand, Oliver Kamps (both ITP) and Benjamin Skjold uses the fact that the ergodic hypothesis is often not fulfilled in real growth processes. An ensemble of cooperating agents is simulated under these conditions and their dynamics are examined. The dynamics result in a behaviour that is similar of Nowak's "kin selection" mechanism, but has a completely different endogenous origin. The article was published in cooperation with the London Mathematical Laboratory.