Mark Kac Seminar

November 4, 2005

introduction talks archive contact location

The seminar takes place in Utrecht, Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, room 030.

11:15-13:00 speaker: Misja Nuyens (VU) title: Bounds for critical values of the Bak-Sneppen model

abstract: 

In the Bak-Sneppen model there are N species arranged on a circle, each of which is assigned a random fitness. The fitnesses are independent and uniformly distributed on (0,1). At each discrete time step the system iterates by locating the lowest fitness and replacing this fitness, and those of its two neighbours, by independent and uniform (0,1) random variables.

By introducing the notion of avalanche, it is possible to study Bak-Sneppen models on all locally finite graphs. With these avalanches we can associate a critical value. This avalanche critical value can be considered as a hidden tuning parameter of the Bak-Sneppen model.

In the talk I hope to show that the avalanches of the Bak-Sneppen model dominate independent site percolation, in a sense to be made precise.
Since avalanches of the Bak-Sneppen model are themselves dominated by a simple branching process, this yields upper and lower bounds for the avalanche critical value. These bounds are quite sharp for the regular tree and the d-dimensional lattice as d tends to infinity.
 

14:15-16:00 speaker: Gregory Maillard (Eurandom) title: Parabolic Anderson model with interacting particle systems branching

abstract:

We study intermittency for the Parabolic Anderson Model when the diffusion is driven by a constant $\kappa$ and the branching is induced either by an exclusion process or a voter model. We consider the annealed Lyapunov exponents and we show that they display an interesting dependence on $\kappa$, with qualitatively different behaviours in different dimensions.
 

 
Mark Kac Seminar 2005-2006  

last updated: 18 okt 2005 by Webmaster