Office: Science
Center 265 Portraits of Complex Nets: B-MatricesResearch Interests: I am interested in the properties of large networks occurring in everyday life (social networks of contact, the Internet and the WWW, networks of flight connections, of neurons in the brain, etc.) and I use tools from statistical physics for their analysis. The study of networks has numerous applications, from devising more efficient networks of transportation, to improving the resilience of the Internet to random breakdown or to intentional attack, to finding strategies for arresting the spread of epidemics that propagate by social interaction. I am also interested in diffusion-limited kinetics, that is, the way reaction processes evolve when the reactants take a much longer time to encounter each other (by diffusion) than to undergo reaction. The situation is dominated by fluctuations at all length scales and gives rise to anomalous kinetics -- quite different from reaction-limited kinetics (where the reaction time is very large), which can be analyzed by classical rate equations. At a more fundamental level, I study diffusion and random walks in fractals and disordered media. In all regular lattices, regardless of dimensionality (e.g., square, triangular, cubic, etc.) diffusion follows a universal scaling law: the mean square displacement increases linearly with time. However, in fractals and disordered media diffusion is anomalous - the mean square displacement grows slower than linearly with time. Other interests of mine include nonequilibrium kinetics and kinetics phase transitions, heterogeneous catalysis (catalytic reactions occurring on surfaces, or the interface of different media), and self avoiding walks (a model for linear polymers). I am also interested in various aspects of biological physics, such as the structure and motility of proteins (normal modes analysis), actin filaments in muscle and the scaffolding of cells, and the role of diffusion in signal transduction. Recent Publications: (Click here for full list of publications)** **
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fails, please try the other links provided. 124. On the Google-Fame of Scientists and other Populations, 123. What is Special about Diffusion in Scale-Free Networks? 122. On the Relation between One-Species Diffusion-Limited Coalescence and Annihilation in One Dimension, 121. First Passage Properties of the Erdös-Rényi Random Graph, 120. A Generalization of both the Method of Images and of the Classical Integral Transforms, A. S. Fokas and D. ben-Avraham, in Advances in Scattering and Biomedical Engineering, D. I. Fotiadis and C. V. Massalas, eds., pp. 260-276 (World Scientific, New Jersey 2004). cond-mat/0307020, pdf 119. Tomography and Stability of Complex Networks, 118. How Famous is a Scientist? --- Famous to Those Who Know Us, 117. Velocity Distribution in a Viscous Granular Gas, 116. One-Dimensional Continuous-Time Quantum Walks, 115. Statistics of Cycles: How Loopy is your Network? 114. Designer Nets from Local Strategies, 113. Immunization and Epidemics Dynamics in Complex Networks, 112. Geographical Embedding of Scale-Free Networks, 111. Self-Similarity in Random Collision Processes, 110. Mean-Field Solution of the Parity-Conserving Kinetic Phase Transition in One Dimension, D. Zhong, D. ben-Avraham, and M. A. Munoz, 109. Invited Paper: Variable Survival Exponents in History-Dependent Random Walks: Hard Movable Reflector, R. Dickman, F. F. Araujo, and D. ben-Avraham, 108. Directed and Non-directed Scale-Free Networks, 107. Book Review: Chaotic Transitions in Deterministic and Stochastic Dynamical Systems / E. Simiu, D. ben-Avraham, 106. Large-Scale Simulations of Diffusion-Limited n-Species Annihilation, 105. Ordering of Random Walks: The Leader and the Laggard, 104. Invited Paper: Structural Properties of Scale-Free Networks, 103. Efficient Immunization Strategies for Computer Networks and Populations, My
work reported in the media Book: Diffusion and Reactions in Fractals and Disordered Systems Back
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