What is statistical mechanics?

Author(s):  
James P. Sethna

Statistical mechanics explains the simple behavior of complex systems. It works by studying not a particular instance, but the typical behavior of a large collection (or ensemble) of systems, which is far easier to calculate. Entropy, free energies, order parameters, phases and phase transitions emerge as collective behaviors that are not manifest in the complex microscopic laws. This text will develop the statistical mechanical machinery needed to generate the new laws governing these emergent behaviors. Exercises in this chapter discuss emergence, Stirling’s formula, random matrix theory, small world networks, an NP complete problem, active matter, and topics in statistics.

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (44) ◽  
pp. 9555-9567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomohiro Sasamoto ◽  
Taro Toyoizumi ◽  
Hidetoshi Nishimori

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Borowiecka-Olszewska ◽  
Ewa Drgas-Burchardt ◽  
Nahid Yelene Javier-Nol ◽  
Rita Zuazua

AbstractWe consider arc colourings of oriented graphs such that for each vertex the colours of all out-arcs incident with the vertex and the colours of all in-arcs incident with the vertex form intervals. We prove that the existence of such a colouring is an NP-complete problem. We give the solution of the problem for r-regular oriented graphs, transitive tournaments, oriented graphs with small maximum degree, oriented graphs with small order and some other classes of oriented graphs. We state the conjecture that for each graph there exists a consecutive colourable orientation and confirm the conjecture for complete graphs, 2-degenerate graphs, planar graphs with girth at least 8, and bipartite graphs with arboricity at most two that include all planar bipartite graphs. Additionally, we prove that the conjecture is true for all perfect consecutively colourable graphs and for all forbidden graphs for the class of perfect consecutively colourable graphs.


Author(s):  
James P. Sethna

This text distills the core ideas of statistical mechanics to make room for new advances important to information theory, complexity, active matter, and dynamical systems. Chapters address random walks, equilibrium systems, entropy, free energies, quantum systems, calculation and computation, order parameters and topological defects, correlations and linear response theory, and abrupt and continuous phase transitions. Exercises explore the enormous range of phenomena where statistical mechanics provides essential insight — from card shuffling to how cells avoid errors when copying DNA, from the arrow of time to animal flocking behavior, from the onset of chaos to fingerprints. The text is aimed at graduates, undergraduates, and researchers in mathematics, computer science, engineering, biology, and the social sciences as well as to physicists, chemists, and astrophysicists. As such, it focuses on those issues common to all of these fields, background in quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and advanced physics should not be needed, although scientific sophistication and interest will be important.


Author(s):  
Lance Fortnow

This chapter demonstrates several approaches for dealing with hard problems. These approaches include brute force, heuristics, and approximation. Typically, no single technique will suffice to handle the difficult NP problems one needs to solve. For moderate-sized problems one can search over all possible solutions with the very fast computers available today. One can use algorithms that might not work for every problem but do work for many of the problems one cares about. Other algorithms may not find the best possible solution but still a solution that's good enough. Other times one just cannot get a solution for an NP-complete problem. One has to try to solve a different problem or just give up.


Author(s):  
Abraham Nitzan

Equilibrium statistical mechanics is a first principle theory whose fundamental statements are general and independent of the details associated with individual systems. No such general theory exists for nonequilibrium systems and for this reason we often have to resort to ad hoc descriptions, often of phenomenological nature, as demonstrated by several examples in Chapters 7 and 8. Equilibrium statistical mechanics can however be extended to describe small deviations from equilibrium in a way that preserves its general nature. The result is Linear Response Theory, a statistical mechanical perturbative expansion about equilibrium. In a standard application we start with a system in thermal equilibrium and attempt to quantify its response to an applied (static- or time-dependent) perturbation. The latter is assumed small, allowing us to keep only linear terms in a perturbative expansion. This leads to a linear relationship between this perturbation and the resulting response. Let us make these statements more quantitative. Consider a system characterized by the Hamiltonian Ĥ0.


Author(s):  
F. W. Albalas ◽  
B. A. Abu-Alhaija ◽  
A. Awajan ◽  
A. Awajan ◽  
Khalid Al-Begain

New web technologies have encouraged the deployment of various network applications that are rich with multimedia and real-time services. These services demand stringent requirements are defined through Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as delay, jitter, loss, etc. To guarantee the delivery of these services QoS routing algorithms that deal with multiple metrics are needed. Unfortunately, QoS routing with multiple metrics is considered an NP-complete problem that cannot be solved by a simple algorithm. This paper proposes three source based QoS routing algorithms that find the optimal path from the service provider to the user that best satisfies the QoS requirements for a particular service. The three algorithms use the same filtering technique to prune all the paths that do not meet the requirements which solves the complexity of NP-complete problem. Next, each of the three algorithms integrates a different Multiple Criteria Decision Making method to select one of the paths that have resulted from the route filtering technique. The three decision making methods used are the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT), and Kepner-Tregoe KT. Results show that the algorithms find a path using multiple constraints with a high ability to handle multimedia and real-time applications.


Author(s):  
D. Sirisha ◽  
G. Vijayakumari

Compute intensive applications featured as workflows necessitate Heterogeneous Processing Systems (HPS) for attaining high performance to minimize the turnaround time. Efficient scheduling of the workflow tasks is paramount to attain higher potentials of HPS and is a challenging NP-Complete problem. In the present work, Branch and Bound (BnB) strategy is applied to optimally schedule the workflow tasks. The proposed bounds are tighter, simpler and less complex than the existing bounds and the upper bound is closer to the exact solution. Moreover, the bounds on the resource provisioning are devised to execute the workflows in the minimum possible time and optimally utilize the resources. The performance of the proposed BnB strategy is evaluated on a suite of benchmark workflows. The experimental results reveal that the proposed BnB strategy improved the optimal solutions compared to the existing heuristic scheduling algorithms for more than 20 percent of the cases and generated better schedules over 7 percent for 82.6 percent of the cases.


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