2005 Annual Report Vol.33 - 中研院物理研究所 - Academia Sinica

esearch of SCP in developing countries. The research topics at LSCP include: equilibrium
critical systems, such as the Ising, dimer, and percolation models; non-equilibrium critical
systems, such as sand-pile and avalanche models; synchronization in nonlinear coupled
systems and analysis of physiological data; models of biological evolution; analytic and
numerical studies of macromolecules, polymer, DNA, RNA, and proteins; stochastic
dynamic model for stock-stock correlations; universality and scaling in statistical data of
literary works. (Chin-Kun Hu, Simon C. Lin)
Exact phase diagram for an asymmetric avalanche process,
which shows the critical density of particles ρas a function of
parameters α and μ of toppling rules in the model. This
figure is taken from Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 084301(2001)
IV. Biology-Inspired Physics
Biological organisms are likely the most complex and the least understood systems that
one can imagine, due to their intricate biochemical and physical interactions among
macromolecules. Biology is essentially an experimental science with huge amount of data,
physicists hope to distill basic principles from them. Because all biological processes
operate in a thermal environment, statistical physics is an indispensable tool in studying
them. Equipped with such tools, we have been studying theoretically: biological and
physiological signals (such as heart beat); development of algorithms and simulations of
macromolecules (DNA, RNA and proteins) with parallel computers (Chin-Kun Hu),
development of new optimization algorithms to study complex systems including protein
structure prediction (Ting-Kuo Lee); and collective behavior of self-propelled particles
manifested in flocking models (Kwan-tai Leung). Moreover, Experimental studies on
synchronized firing of neural net has also been carried out (Chi-Keung Chan).
Breakdown of protein structure due to increasing side chains interaction