Noise-Induced Phase Transitions

噪声在传统上被认为是一种干扰物理系统的“有趣”或“内在”行为的“营养物质”。 在过去的20年里，这种有限的观点忽略了噪音实际上可以增强甚至导致理想行为的工具性方式，这一点已经变得非常清楚，但这种情况发生的方式仍然是丰富的调查基础。 在这个项目中，我们专注于这样一个戏剧性的现象，即在空间扩展系统中的噪声诱导相变。 这些都是宏观的转变，其中噪声不仅导致系统从一个相位到另一个相位，而且相位的存在取决于噪声的存在;在没有噪声的情况下，系统只能存在于一个相位。 调查将试图系统地探索导致噪声引起的相变的基本特征，这些过渡与噪声引起的信号增强现象，如随机共振，控制和适应性的设计参数，以产生噪声引起的相位与所需的属性，和用户友好的界面，允许可视化的空间分布的嘈杂的非线性系统的发展的相互作用。

Noise has traditionally been thought of as a "Nuisance" that interferes with the "interesting" or "intrinsic" behavior of physical systems. That this limited view misses the instrumental ways in which noise can actually enhance and even cause desirable behaviors has become quite clear in the past two decades, but the ways in which this can occur are still grounds for fertile investigation. In this project we focus on one such dramatic phenomenon, that of noise-induced phase transitions in spatially extended systems. These are macroscopic transitions where the noise not only causes the system to go from one phase to another, but where the very existence of the phases is predicated on the presence of the noise; in its absence the system can only exist in one phase. The investigations will attempt to systematically explore the basic features that lead to noise-induced phase transitions, the interplay of these transitions with noise-induced signal enhancement phenomena such as stochastic resonance, the control and adaptability of design parameters to produce noise-induced phases with desired properties, and the development of user-friendly interfaces that allow visualization of spatially distributed noisy nonlinear systems.