Dynamical evolution of the community structure of complex earthquake network

Earthquake network is known to be complex in the sense that it is scale-free, small-world, hierarchically organized and assortatively mixed. Here, the time evolution of earthquake network is analyzed around main shocks in the context of the community structure. It is found that the maximum of the modularity measure quantifying existence of communities exhibits a peculiar behavior: its maximum value stays at a large value before a main shock, suddenly drops to a small value at the main shock, and then increases to relax to a large value again relatively slowly. Thus, a main shock absorbs and merges communities to create a larger community, showing how a main shock can be characterized in the complex-network representation of seismicity.

On the Geodesic Nature of Wegners Flow

Wegners method of flow equations offers a useful tool for diagonalizing a given Hamiltonian and is widely used in various branches of quantum physics. Here, generalizing this method, a condition is derived, under which the corresponding flow of a quantum state becomes geodesic in a submanifold of the projective Hilbert space, independently of specific initial conditions. This implies the geometric optimality of the present method as an algorithm of generating stationary states. The result is illustrated by analyzing some physical examples.

Finite data-size scaling of clustering in earthquake networks

Earthquake network is known to be of the small-world type. The values of the network characteristics, however, depend not only on the cell size (i.e., the scale of coarse graining needed for constructing the network) but also on the size of a seismic data set. Here, discovery of a scaling law for the clustering coefficient in terms of the data size, which is refereed to here as finite data-size scaling, is reported. Its universality is shown to be supported by the detailed analysis of the data taken from California, Japan and Iran. Effects of setting threshold of magnitude are also discussed.

Earthquake Networks, Complex

An article for the Springer Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science

Macroscopic proof of the Jarzynski-Wojcik fluctuation theorem for heat exchange

In a recent work, Jarzynski and Wojcik (2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 230602) have shown by using the properties of Hamiltonian dynamics and a statistical mechanical consideration that, through contact, heat exchange between two systems initially prepared at different temperatures obeys a fluctuation theorem. Here, another proof is presented, in which only macroscopic thermodynamic quantities are employed. The detailed balance condition is found to play an essential role. As a result, the theorem is found to hold under very general conditions.

Robustness of the second law of thermodynamics under generalizations of the maximum entropy method

It is shown that the laws of thermodynamics are extremely robust under generalizations of the form of entropy. Using the Bregman-type relative entropy, the Clausius inequality is proved to be always valid. This implies that thermodynamics is highly universal and does not rule out consistent generalization of the maximum entropy method.