Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 27: Nonequilibrium Processes and Self-Organisation

BP 27.1: Invited Talk

Friday, March 30, 2007, 10:30–11:00, H43

From target search to travel bugs: scale free motion in biology — •Dirk Brockmann — MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

Numerous physical, biological and social systems exhibit anomalous diffusion, i.e particles or mobile agents perform stochastic motion that violates the key features of ordinary Brownian motion. Superdiffusion is typically a consequence of a lack of scale in the spatial increments, the distribution of which follows an inverse power-law with divergent second moment. For these processes the term Lévy flight has been coined and the utilisation fractional diffusion equations turns out to be a key theoretical framework to describe these systems. Lévy flights exhibit particulary interesting behavior when they evolve in heterogeneous environments and when superdiffusion is a consequence of the topological complexity of the system. I will give an overview of recent discoveries of this type of topological superdiffusion and similar processes in a variety of biological systems ranging from facilitated target location of proteins on folding heteropolymers, optimal saccadic scanpaths in human eye-movements, the geographic trajectories of banknotes to current research on the dispersal of travel bugs. These are tagged items that are part of geocaching, a worldwide kind of GPS treature hunt. I will allude to similarities between these systems, discuss there differences and provide a general theoretical framework for the description of topologically superdiffusive systems.