Topology Protects Chiral Edge Currents in Stochastic Systems
Constructing systems that exhibit timescales much longer than those of the underlying components, as well as emergent dynamical and collective behavior, is a key goal in fields such as synthetic biology and materials self-assembly. Inspiration often comes from living systems, in which robust global...
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Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | article |
Lenguaje: | EN |
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American Physical Society
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://doaj.org/article/ec14edd9795b4ebdbf6dd8bdae01fd6d |
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Sumario: | Constructing systems that exhibit timescales much longer than those of the underlying components, as well as emergent dynamical and collective behavior, is a key goal in fields such as synthetic biology and materials self-assembly. Inspiration often comes from living systems, in which robust global behavior prevails despite the stochasticity of the underlying processes. Here, we present two-dimensional stochastic networks that consist of minimal motifs representing out-of-equilibrium cycles at the molecular scale and support chiral edge currents in configuration space. These currents arise in the topological phase because of the bulk-boundary correspondence and dominate the system dynamics in the steady state, further proving robust to defects or blockages. We demonstrate the topological properties of these networks and their uniquely non-Hermitian features such as exceptional points and vorticity, while characterizing the edge-state localization. As these emergent edge currents are associated with macroscopic timescales and length scales, simply tuning a small number of parameters enables varied dynamical phenomena, including a global clock, dynamical growth and shrinkage, and synchronization. Our construction provides a novel topological formalism for stochastic systems and fresh insights into non-Hermitian physics, paving the way for the prediction of robust dynamical states in new classical and quantum platforms. |
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