A chaotic environment can give rise to "flares" if an autocatalytic variable responds in a multiplicative, threshold-type fashion to the environmental forcing. An "economic unit" similarly depends in its growth behavior on the unpredictable (chaotic?) buying habits of its customers, say. It turns out that coupled flare attractors are surprisingly robust in the sense that the resulting "economy"...

Spatiotemporal self-organization is found in a wide range of distributed dynamical systems. The coupling of the active elements in these systems may be local or global or within a network, and the interactions may be diffusive or nondiffusive in nature. The articles in this focus issue describe biological and chemical systems designed to exhibit spatiotemporal dynamics and the control of such d...

As a liquid is progressively supercooled toward its glass transition temperature, an intriguing weakening of the wavenumber (q) dependence of the structural relaxation time tau(q) in the intermediate-to-large q limit is observed both in experiments and simulation studies. Neither continuous Brownian diffusive dynamics nor discontinuous activated events can alone explain the anomalous wavenumber...

Landscape evolution theory suggests that climate sets the scale of landscape dissection by modulating the competition between diffusive processes that sculpt convex hillslopes and advective processes that carve concave valleys. However, the link between the relative dominance of hillslope and valley transport processes and landscape scale is difficult to demonstrate in natural landscapes due to...

We introduce a simple model to investigate large scale behavior of gradient flows based on a lattice of coupled maps which, in addition to the usual diffusive term, incorporates advection, as an asymmetry in the coupling between nearest neighbors. This diffusive-advective model predicts traveling patterns to have velocities obeying the same scaling as wind velocities in the atmosphere, regardin...

We report a theoretical investigation on spin-Hall conductance fluctuation of disordered four-terminal devices in the presence of Rashba or/and Dresselhaus spin-orbital interactions in two dimensions. As a function of disorder, the spin-Hall conductance GsH shows ballistic, diffusive, and insulating transport regimes. For given spin-orbit interactions, a universal spin-Hall conductance fluctuat...

We consider the evolution of the separation distance between two particles advected by a random velocity field with slowly decaying temporal and spatial correlations in the weak coupling regime. It has been shown in [5] that the motion of a single particle converges to a fractional Brownian motion on a time scale δ−γ with some γ < 2, which is shorter than the classical diffusive time scale δ−2 ...

How viruses are transmitted across the mucosal epithelia of the respiratory, digestive, or excretory tracts, and how they spread from cell to cell and cause systemic infections, is incompletely understood. Recent advances from single virus tracking experiments have revealed conserved patterns of virus movements on the plasma membrane, including diffusive motions, drifting motions depending on r...

We study self-diffusion in complex fluids within dynamic density functional theory and explicitly account for the coupling to the fluctuating background. Applying the formalism to nematic and smectic liquid crystals, we find the temporary cages formed by neighboring particles to compete with permanent barriers in nonuniform systems, resulting in non-Gaussian diffusive motion that in different d...