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Friday 14 August

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from nlin.CD

Resilience Beyond Pairwise Networks

We derive a one-dimensional reduction for nonlinear dynamics on simplicial complexes containing both pairwise and triangular (higher-order) interactions. The effective state is defined using a mixed weight determined by the pairwise and triangular degrees of each node. The resulting reduced equation retains two structural coefficients, associated separately with the pairwise and higher-order coupling channels. A fluctuation expansion identifies the closure assumptions underlying the reduction and shows how deviations of individual node states from the effective state contribute to the approximation error. We numerically validate the proposed framework on Gene-regulatory dynamics, the double-well system, and SIS spreading. The states of the reduced model are compared with full-network simulations through coupling-parameter sweeps, steady-state branch calculations, and progressive node-removal experiments on synthetic and real-world networks. The reduced model successfully reproduces the principal transitions and steady-state branches in all three dynamical systems considered. Agreement is strongest for relatively homogeneous networks and deteriorates when structural heterogeneity produces a broader distribution of node states. The closure diagnostics account for this loss of accuracy and indicate when a single effective state is no longer sufficient. The reduction therefore provides a tractable description of resilience in systems with coexisting pairwise and higher-order interactions.
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Physics and Society

Structural Divergence of the Inca Imperial Network, 1400–1572~CE: Persistent Homology, Substitution Topology, and the Topological Signature of Decapitation Collapse

We apply persistent homology to a six-layer temporal network model of the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu), built from the Qhapaq Ñan road system ($6{,}546$ segments; $12{,}031$~km): 4,492 nodes (4,452 active; 40 isolated removed), $4{,}358$ edges, $57$ temporal snapshots (1400–1572~CE). The complete flag complex yields $\beta_1 = 32$ cycles ($26$ macro-continental, $6$ meso-regional) and $\beta_0 = 264$ components at the finest filtration, evaluated across six layers: infrastructure, Inca political control, Spanish alliance growth, Andean tribute commerce, and Spanish legal/effective administration. Five results. (i) Infrastructure entropy $H_{\mathrm{infra}}=1.486\pm0.0001$ stays constant throughout, indicating no detectable topological disruption of the Qhapaq Ñan at this resolution. (ii) Inca political entropy $H_{\mathrm{inca}}$ is stable through the Cajamarca capture (1532~CE), then collapses to zero by 1537~CE; the dominant break is at Vilcabamba ($F=120.7$), not Cajamarca ($F=11.5$). (iii) Four of six layers reach the critical regime at 1532~CE, while infrastructure stays marginally below threshold ($\mathrm{ICT}=0.495$); trade and political reach the highest values ($\mathrm{ICT}=0.976$, $0.968$), marking Cajamarca as a synchronised multi-layer phase transition. (iv) Spanish legal administration converges to the infrastructure topology by 1572~CE ($W_1=5\times10^{-6}\approx0$): Substitution Topology, infrastructure-preserving collapse via topology transfer. (v) Legal–effective divergence decays from $W_1=0.591$ (1532) to $0.002$ (1572), quantifying resolution of colonial legal fiction. Together, these results support a distinct collapse mode—Substitution Topology—differing from erosion-dominated Roman/Byzantine collapse, Han fragmentation, and Aztec military destruction.
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Physics and Society

A Dual Topological Pipeline for Imperial Network Analysis: Persistent Homology, Structural Fragility, and the Aztec Collapse

We apply persistent homology and a dual-model topological pipeline to a multilayer network of the Aztec Empire (Triple Alliance, 1427–1521 CE), constructed from tribute records and geographic adjacency among 38 nodes (Tenochtitlan-Centro, 36 tribute-paying provinces, and the Tlaxcala enclave) and 208 edges. We report four main results: (i) The tribute (control) layer is a pure extraction tree ($\bettione = 0$, $H = 0.000$ at all epochs): structurally more fragile than any documented configuration in the Roman, Byzantine, or Han administrative datasets analyzed with the same pipeline. (ii) Single-node removal of Tenochtitlan-Centro collapses the giant component from 1.000 to 0.630 and eliminates 30 redundancy cycles simultaneously, a structural asymmetry ratio of $>4$:1 relative to random perturbation. (iii) The Tlaxcala–Puebla region coincides with the dominant $\bettione$ class of the imperial geographic point cloud (persistence $= 22.09$~km, versus $< 3$~km for all others), a structural void that exists identically whether Tlaxcala is modeled as absent or present in the filtration. (iv) A logistic regression confirms that commercial centrality in the geographic layer ($r = +0.462$, $p = 0.004$) is the dominant predictor of early alliance formation, while tribute burden is uncorrelated ($r = -0.033$, $p = 0.845$). These four results define a new imperial collapse mode, the void-occupied tree, in which zero topological redundancy in the control layer coincides with a dominant geometric void occupied by an autonomous enclave—a configuration not previously documented in historical network TDA.
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Thursday 13 August

Physics and Society

Measuring Collective Semantic Change in Populations of Language Model Agents

Collective semantic change in populations of language model agents is a measurable dynamical phenomenon. We present a passive longitudinal instrument called Kopterix that observes the semantic state of an agent population as a sequence of bounded observations under a protocol defined before the observations begin. Each observation divides the sampled feed by post age into surface, mid-stream, and residue layers, which makes semantic differences across content age measurable alongside run-to-run change. We validate the instrument on Moltbook, an agent-native social platform, over a two-month window of scheduled observations, with the periodicity check extended across approximately four months. At the lexical level, rarefied entropy resolves an April-May difference in the evenness of the stored top 200 unigram distributions, and adjacent states are lexically closer than states paired after timestamp shuffling. At the geometric level, grand mean centering exposes the scale of a common embedding direction, and scheduled shuffle checks support a recurring excess in the mid-stream to residue separation relative to the shuffled reference. At the temporal level, detrended scalar quantities and centered layer centroids lose much of their similarity over several hours, and a weaker positive component declines across longer separations with no strong weekly recurrence. Several attractive apparent structures failed their controls, and each reading is limited to the level its controls support. The design applies wherever a population of agents produces a timestamped language environment that can be observed repeatedly and divided by content age.
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Physics and Society

Beyond persuasion: Mobile electoral interfaces in polarized societies

Many traditional models of electoral dynamics emphasize opinion change, social influence and persuasion mechanisms. In contrast, contemporary polarized societies often exhibit relatively stable partisan blocs coexisting with an electorally relevant mobile population. We propose a minimal dynamical model in which electoral competition is governed not by direct persuasion between opposing blocs, but by the dynamics and allocation of a mobile electoral interface. The electorate is partitioned into two stable partisan blocs and a mobile fraction, while direct transitions between the polarized blocs are strongly suppressed. Mobile voters are allocated between the competing blocs through a Fermi-like probabilistic rule governed by rejection asymmetries. Analytical calculations show that the electoral susceptibility to political shocks is proportional to the stationary size of the mobile electoral interface, identifying electoral mobility as the key quantity controlling the macroscopic response of polarized systems to external perturbations. The model naturally predicts a continuum of mobility regimes, ranging from frozen polarization to highly responsive electoral states characterized by a broad mobile interface. These results suggest that, in strongly polarized elections, aggregate electoral changes may be governed primarily by fluctuations at the mobile electoral interface rather than by large-scale ideological conversion.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from nlin.CD

Dimension Reduction of Higher-Order Dynamical Networks

Low-dimensional reductions provide a useful framework for studying high-dimensional dynamics on complex networks, but most existing approaches are restricted to pairwise interactions. Here, we develop a one-dimensional reduction for dynamical systems on networks with purely higher-order interactions. The reduction is formulated through an effective higher-order interaction strength ($\beta_{\Delta}$), associated with the triangular interactions of the underlying network and the dynamical system's effective state. We present a theoretical framework for the dimension-reduction approach and validate it across three dynamical models with exclusively higher-order interactions. We find that the reduction accuracy is mainly determined by the homogeneity of node states, i.e., the deviations in state values become very small. Numerical results on synthetic and real networks show that the reduced model captures the effective steady states and transitions of the full system with good accuracy.
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Wednesday 12 August

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from physics.pop-ph

Limits on Kinematic Inference from the PURSUE Airborne Sensor Videos

This paper analyzes the 112 sensor videos released under the PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) initiative. Redactions to on-screen displays limit information available for identifying the reported unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Converting the rate at which any object transits across part or all of a frame from pixels per frame to a physical velocity requires (1) the range to the object, (2) the velocity of the observing aircraft, (3) the aspect angle between the object's path and observer, and (4) the field angle of the camera. No PURSUE video provides this set of information. In one clip (DOW-UAP-PR113), the object crosses depression-angle markings, which allows reconstruction of the camera's field of view. Even this clip does not provide sufficient information to distinguish between a bird flying at close range and a large craft traveling at Mach 5 a kilometer away. A second clip (DOW-UAP-PR149) includes a vessel of known size in the frame, which can be used as a reference to calculate an upper bound of Mach 0.4 on the object's relative velocity. Without further information, the PURSUE sensor videos in their present form cannot fully resolve unidentified cases or conclusively indicate anomalous velocities.
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Physics and Society

Economic Distance Structures Urban Mobility in 109 U.S. Cities

Urban mobility promises social integration, yet daily movement is systematically constrained by socioeconomic hierarchies. Introducing "economic distance"–the continuous income gap between origin and destination–as a unified lens, we analyze large-scale mobility records across 109 U.S. cities to reveal how urban flows are structured. We identify a universal structural boundary: flows concentrate intensely within a narrow economic distance of 0.25 quantiles, defining the effective "economic radius" of routine mobility. This boundary exhibits profound asymmetry; upward mobility faces a uniform structural ceiling across cities, whereas downward mobility drives cross-city heterogeneity. Mechanistically, the boundary is physically anchored by meso-scale residential clustering but is further tightened by an independent economic-distance friction, validated via gravity modeling. These interactions yield four distinct mobility regimes, with "affluent-confined" systems exhibiting the strongest stratification. These findings establish economic distance as a fundamental, asymmetric, and multi-scale filter shaping urban inequality, offering new theoretical grounds for interventions targeting structural barriers to cross-class interaction.
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All authors Wei-Peng Nie, Xiao-Yong Yan, Bin Jia, Fang Zhou, Er-Jian Liu, Tao Zhou, Zi-You Gao

Physics and Society

Robustness over efficiency in climate coalitions: a bistable model and a map of architectures

Designs for international climate cooperation face a trade-off between efficiency and robustness to institutional erosion by defection, renegotiation, and political turnover. We formalize this trade-off in a stylized coalition-formation game with two market-based enrolment channels, a membership premium and an outsider drain, stabilized against bounded perturbations with robust control. The free-rider gap is exact within the game, expressed in measurable primitives, and separated from the architecture-specific channels. The drain is decomposed into a fiscal border channel, capped by trade law at the rent it mirrors, and a compensated terms-of-trade channel, making every channel strength measurable. With sufficiently strong channels the model is bistable: a remnant club and a near-universal coalition are separated by a critical mass. For a newly proposed carbon currency, whose emission rights are reissued each period, extinguished upon use, and enforced at the border, the minimal nucleus is thirty per cent of global emissions, ignition from an EU-China nucleus requires compensating one fifth to three fifths of the outsiders' terms-of-trade loss, the established coalition withstands two to four times the perturbation admissible at ignition, and the tipping survives heterogeneity to about three times the membership premium. Two robustness coordinates place each architecture in a map with three regimes, opening a comparative dynamics of climate clubs: the carbon currency is self-igniting, the border adjustment founding-dependent, the export rebate permanent-support-dependent. Architectures without a drain improve efficiency within a coalition but cannot drive its formation. Robustness governs whether cooperation forms and endures; efficiency decides how much an established coalition delivers.
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Physics and Society

Sectoral inter-dependencies drive the loss of structural balance in signed financial networks

Signed graphs provide an effective architecture for portraying a system in which cooperation and conflict coexist. Emerging from the concept of balance in psychological sciences, they have found applications across several domains. Financial markets are one such example that can be modeled using signed networks, where assets exhibit correlations in price movements. During periods of systemic risk, such a signed financial network shows a loss of balance, which has been consistently demonstrated. Here, we explore how this structural imbalance is distributed across scales within the financial network, revealing its mesoscopic origin. Adopting the framework of structural balance theory, we use a measure of polarization based on triadic motifs to investigate the distribution of structural imbalance across varying sectoral scales. We analyze the temporal evolution of global polarization and its sectoral constituents using longitudinal data derived from the S&P 500 index. By decomposing global polarization into intra-sectoral and inter-sectoral constituents, we show that structural imbalance arises predominantly from interactions between sectors rather than within them during periods marked by systemic risk. We employ randomization protocols to confirm that observed imbalance configurations are statistically significant and not artifacts of lower-order interactions. We derive a regression equation demonstrating that the variance in global polarization is well explained by macroeconomic variables, indicating that low levels of global polarization during economic crises are driven by compounding pressures from supply chain disruptions and inflation uncertainty. Collectively, these findings provide a quantitative framework for understanding how localized sectoral conflicts propagate across the financial network and contribute to large-scale structural instability during periods of economic crisis.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Disaster Information Reachability of Medium-Wave AM Broadcasting as a Wide-Area Disaster Information Infrastructure: Lessons from the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake

The 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake caused widespread power outages, communication failures, and road disruptions, and a tsunami warning was issued immediately after the earthquake, highlighting the importance of reliable disaster information transmission. The Noto Peninsula is surrounded by the sea on three sides and has limited transportation networks, making community isolation and securing reliable information transmission critical challenges. This study defines "Disaster Information Reachability" as the capacity to deliver necessary information to those who need it when they need it, and examines the role of medium-wave AM broadcasting from this perspective. In September 2024, the author conducted a mobile reception survey from Kanazawa to Suzu City and a fixed-point reception survey in Suzu City using commercially available radio receivers and passive radio receivers, including HOOPRA. Medium-wave stations in Niigata, Toyama, Akita, and Tokyo were clearly received, although the local NHK Kanazawa stations were affected by noise. The nationwide high-power NHK Radio 2 network, which was still operational at the time, was confirmed to provide a wide-area, multidirectional reception pathway through maritime propagation, demonstrating its critical significance as a redundant disaster information infrastructure. The fact that FM relay station damage was documented in subsequent policy materials, while medium-wave AM broadcasting received no explicit attention, suggests that its disaster information reachability remains insufficiently recognized. Medium-wave AM broadcasting, with its wide-area simultaneous broadcast capability, high-power coverage, and maritime propagation characteristics, functions effectively as a disaster information infrastructure in peninsular regions and warrants reassessment in preparation for large-scale disasters such as a Nankai Trough megaquake.
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Physics and Society

Twenty-Five Years of Air Quality in Bangladesh: Trends, Seasonality, and Spatial Pollution Regimes

Air pollution is one of Bangladesh's most pressing environmental problems, yet few studies have examined it at a national scale over a long time span. To describe trends, seasonality, geographic patterns, and pollution regimes, this study examines 25 years of hourly air quality data (2000-2025), covering over 3.19 million records, eight pollutants, and 103 cities monitored from 2022 onward following expansion from a single Dhaka station. The composite AQI series showed no significant long-term trend, an artifact of this network expansion rather than a real flattening of pollution, since Dhaka's own AQI rose steadily before the network grew. Seasonality was strong and highly significant, as AQI peaked in January (162.26) and fell to its lowest in July (61.47), tracking the dry and monsoon seasons. Geographically, southeastern coastal cities, including Teknaf and Bandarban, consistently recorded the lowest AQI levels. Dhaka remained the most polluted city, and air quality improved progressively with distance from the capital. K-means clustering of city-level AQI trajectories identified four distinct pollution regimes, ranging from cleaner coastal regions to a rapidly deteriorating Dhaka-Narsingdi cluster with an average increase of 1.84 AQI per year. Correlation analysis showed that PM2.5 and PM10 were the dominant contributors to AQI variation, and so combustion-related emissions are the primary target for air quality management and policy intervention.
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All authors Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Mohammad Fahim Islam, Rafid Bin Zaman, Mohammad Saifuddin, Sabrina Sultana

Tuesday 11 August

Physics and Society

Technology interactions reshape the economics of China's coal power decarbonization

Decarbonizing existing coal-fired power plants can contribute to near-term climate mitigation, but identifying cost-effective retrofit strategies is complicated by interactions among mitigation technologies. Here we develop an interaction-aware optimization framework that jointly evaluates energy conservation, biomass co-firing, and carbon capture across 1,885 coal-fired power plants in China while accounting for plant heterogeneity and shared biomass and CO2 storage resources. We find that technology interactions alter both mitigation costs and the emission reductions attributable to individual measures, thereby changing cost-optimal technology portfolios and marginal abatement cost curve at the fleet level. Approximately 1.2 Gt CO2 yr-1 can be mitigated at negative marginal cost, while reaching carbon neutrality requires a marginal abatement cost of US$56 t CO2-1. Progressively deeper mitigation shifts the cost-optimal portfolio from energy conservation toward biomass co-firing and ultimately carbon capture, with biomass combined with carbon capture enabling net-negative emissions. Explicitly accounting for interactions among mitigation technologies therefore provides a more consistent basis for evaluating coal-power decarbonization and coordinating retrofit investment, infrastructure development, and climate policy.
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All authors Yun-Long Zhang, Jia-Ning Kang, Xiaoming Kan, Lan-Cui Liu, Zhimin Huang, Song Peng, Biying Yu, Yi-Ming Wei

Physics and Society

Unlocking CCUS-Ready Coal Power Investments: A Spatial Real Options Approach

New coal-fired capacity may still be needed in some economies to support energy security, yet tightening carbon constraints increasingly threaten its long-term investment viability. Designing new plants to be Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS)-ready is therefore critical, but existing investment studies largely neglect the spatial factors that shape CCUS investment viability. In this study, we propose a Spatial Real Options (SRO) framework that couples national-scale siting screening with site-level real-options valuation. A national inventory of technically feasible sites across China (n = 194,027) is linked to a real-options model that incorporates temporal uncertainty together with province-specific conditions, CO2 transport distance, and alternative policy instruments. Results show that the nationwide investable window for conventional coal closes by the early-to-mid 2040s. CCUS integration materially reshapes project economics, but outcomes differ substantially across storage options and transport distances: oil-reservoir storage remains economically attractive at short distances, whereas saline-aquifer storage requires operational incentives to become competitive. Generation-hour compensation substantially outperforms investment-cost subsidies, indicating that operating costs, rather than upfront capital, constitute the binding constraint. The resulting spatiotemporal maps provide a practical decision-support tool for identifying where and when CCUS-ready coal investments are most attractive under progressive decarbonization.
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All authors Yun-Long Zhang, Jia-Ning Kang, Lan-Cui Liu, Yi-Zhuo Ji, Song Peng, Yi-Ming Wei

Physics and Society

Radicalization Kinetics under Algorithmic Exposure in a Stochastic Multiplex Model of Opinion Dynamics

We study how physical mobility, algorithmic exposure, and repulsive social influence interact in a stochastic multiplex model of opinion dynamics. Agents diffuse in physical space while a directed digital network rewires under a conserved attention budget, so digital exposure displaces rather than supplements local interaction. With purely assimilative bounded-confidence influence, opinion-blind long-range exposure reduces locality-induced fragmentation whereas homophilic recommendation preserves echo chambers. When a contested repulsive response to sufficiently distant opinions is activated, this ordering reverses at the reference parameters: a neutral platform reaches the maximal polarization permitted by the bounded opinion space, controversy-seeking curation drives faster initial separation but slows sharply near the boundary, and homophilic curation delays radicalization by suppressing cross-bloc exposure. In a late-stage symmetric two-bloc reduction, any curation kernel maps to a state-dependent cross-bloc exposure profile $p(y)$ and an exact quadrature for the radicalization time. Pointwise-ordered profiles inherit a global kinetic ordering; crossing profiles yield target- and horizon-dependent rankings. For similarity-driven curation the quadrature has a closed form involving the exponential integral. Simulations, finite-size scans to $N=1600$, structural controls, and a well-mixed particle comparison support the mechanism. Heavy-tailed influence strengths are not required for the inversion; in the well-mixed heavy-tail regime they additionally produce a non-self-averaging stable-weighted asymptotic description. Finally, opinion-independent Brownian mobility produces no detectable geographic opinion structure in the explored regime, whereas opinion-dependent drift produces spatial domains through a Péclet-controlled crossover near $\chi\ell/D \sim 1$.
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Physics and Society

Universality and Heterogeneity of Stylized Facts in Cryptocurrency and Equity Markets

This study investigates whether the macroscopic statistical maturity of cryptocurrencies implies dynamical equivalence with an equity-market benchmark. We analyze one-minute data (2020–2025) for Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and E-mini S&P~500 futures using the Complexity–Entropy Causality Plane (CECP) and directed horizontal visibility graphs (DHVG). While conventional stylized facts overlap across the analyzed assets, cryptocurrencies exhibit weaker local ordinal organization and a larger divergence between their high-degree in- and out-visibility distributions relative to matched surrogate baselines under the primary specification. This high-degree separation is strongest at the one-minute scale and weakens under 5- and 10-minute aggregation, while the direction of the underlying asymmetry remains more asset- and preprocessing-dependent. We therefore conclude only that macroscopic similarity can coexist with diagnostic-specific structural differences in the assets and period examined.
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Physics and Society

The Triadic Stress Index in Financial Markets

The Triadic Stress Index (TSI) takes a network index whose four factors were first observed in soil microbiome co-occurrence networks and applies it, without alteration, to the correlation network of financial assets. We test it on five markets spanning 2006-2026 (equities including banking crises and the AI sector, cryptocurrencies, commodities, foreign exchange and sovereign debt), against three independent definitions of a crisis episode, at a fixed alarm budget, out of sample, with block-bootstrap intervals and a Holm correction across the family of tests. The benchmarks are the Absorption Ratio, the industry standard used by MSCI and central banks; the effective rank and the Vendi score, the sharpest spectral measures available; Ollivier-Ricci curvature; and the global and local balance indices of signed correlation networks. Three comparisons favour the index. It carries a per-node decomposition, diag(A^3), naming which asset is carrying the concentration with no parameter to select, and scores 0.97-0.99 against 0.33-0.84 for the only published per-node alternative, whereas spectral attribution must first choose how many components to read and collapses under a standard but wrong choice. Its alarms are the cleanest of anything tested, 4.0% of them with no matching episode against 14.7% for the effective rank and roughly 59% for the Absorption Ratio. And it beats the Absorption Ratio on detection by 0.273 in F1 out of sample, p<0.0005. The remaining comparisons are ties. Against the effective rank and the Vendi score the index ties in every scheme and both samples, and the margin over the Absorption Ratio narrows under the strictest labelling. On real matrices the far simpler node degree reproduces the attribution. A lead-lag analysis puts the peak cross-correlation at zero lag: this is a coincident state index, not a forecast.
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Monday 10 August

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from astro-ph.IM

Which is the best day of the week to submit to arXiv:astro-ph?

We examine whether the citations received by refereed astronomy papers vary systematically with the day of the week of their arXiv preprint release. We use NASA ADS citation data for all refereed articles published in 2020–2023 in six journals (MNRAS, ApJ, ApJL, ApJS, A&A and JCAP; 37,173 papers with astro-ph primary preprints), combined with version-1 submission timestamps from the arXiv API. We group papers both by submission weekday and by the day their announcement batch appears on arXiv, accounting for arXiv's weekday deadline and lack of weekend announcements. Given the heavy skew of citation distributions, our primary statistic is the median citations per group, with bootstrap confidence intervals. Papers submitted on weekends, all of which appear in the Monday listing, have median citations significantly lower than weekday submissions in five of the six journals, by 12–26 %; the sixth (JCAP) shows the same direction, but not significantly, consistent with its small weekend sample. Median citations are indistinguishable across the five weekdays. These results extend the recently reported weekend citation disadvantage in particle and nuclear physics to astronomy. The link is correlational, consistent with either compositional variations in weekend submissions or reduced visibility in the enlarged Monday listings.
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Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.SI

Ollivier's Ricci Curvature on Complex-weighted Graphs

Understanding the geometry of complex networks is critical for effective modeling and analysis across domains. While discrete notions of Ricci curvature have emerged as powerful tools for characterizing both local and global network structure, existing formulations are largely confined to undirected networks with real-valued weights. This limits the use of curvature-based analysis of directional and complex-weighted relations that arise naturally in many applications, from social and biological systems to quantum and signal-processing networks. In this work, we introduce a principled extension of Ollivier's Ricci curvature to complex-weighted graphs, which encompasses directed graphs as a special case. We establish fundamental theoretical properties of this new notion, including relations to the magnetic Laplacian and combinatorial upper and lower bounds that relate curvature to cycle structure in local neighborhoods. We further develop computational methods for curvature estimation and demonstrate their utility in community detection on directed networks.
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Physics and Society

The impact of the path ensemble on path percolation

Traffic-induced failures, from packet loss in communication networks to congestion breakdown in transport systems, occur when flows progressively exhaust the edges they traverse. Path percolation models this process by removing edges along sampled origin-destination paths. Existing work assumes locally tree-like networks and deterministic shortest-path routing, leaving unclear how path degeneracy and routing stochasticity affect fragmentation in the clustered networks typical of real systems. We introduce a generalised path-percolation framework where paths are drawn from a temperature-controlled routing ensemble interpolating between geodesic and noisy transport. We argue based on box-covering renormalisation and our numerical experiments that, for any finite routing horizon $C$, the process coarse-grains to ordinary mean-field percolation. Routing details affect non-universal quantities, especially the percolation threshold $p_c$, through the entropy of the load distribution and the capacity of finite clusters to accommodate flow. Load entropy therefore acts as a robustness measure for networks under path-based failures. When the routing horizon is tuned to the mean-field correlation length, $C=N^{1/3}$, within a source-uniform ensemble, the system enters a crossover regime with scaling exponents distinct from shortest-path percolation with infinite budget. In this regime, path elongation becomes decoupled in time from structural fragmentation: the characteristic path length reaches a growing maximum, associated with routing temperature, asymptotically ahead of the collapse of the giant component. These results clarify how microscopic routing organisation shapes macroscopic resilience, and identify path elongation as a measurable precursor of failure in communication and transport infrastructure.
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Sunday 9 August

Physics and Society

The Calibration-Leverage Tradeoff in Exactly Solvable Win-Probability Models

We study ball-by-ball win probability (WP) for second-innings run chases in Twenty20 cricket, built as an exactly solvable Markov model: we estimate a single object, the per-ball outcome distribution over {0,...,6, wicket}, and derive WP for every game state by backward induction over the acyclic (balls, wickets, runs-required) chase graph. This construction makes WP an exact martingale, which in turn makes leverage (how much a ball can swing WP) and win probability added (WPA) well-defined and exactly attributable; we use them to confirm that finishers and death bowlers occupy the highest-leverage moments. We then show the model's WP is systematically miscalibrated, and that this is not incidental. Localizing the error, we rule out tail-thinning and marginal mis-estimation (the model's per-ball outcome distribution matches the empirical one to a total variation of at most 0.02 at every required run rate). The only remaining cause is unmodelled dependence given the state, and we identify it: a permutation-null decomposition shows short-range sequential run-scoring persistence (roughly 3-5 balls; innings-level heterogeneity contributes only about 18%; wickets, if anything, anti-cluster). A block-bootstrap simulator that injects the real dependence while holding the marginals fixed closes 26% of the calibration gap (replicated over six seeds), saturating at block lengths of about 20 balls, consistent with the measured correlation range; this is a constructive lower bound that confirms the diagnosis. The result is a structural tradeoff relative to the (balls, wickets, runs) state description: exact leverage requires the martingale, the martingale requires conditional ball independence on that state, and that independence is what miscalibrates the WP. Exactly attributable leverage and well-calibrated WP cannot be obtained from the same object over this state.
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Physics and Society

Towards an LLM-based method for quantifying the sexual content in song lyrics

Reggaeton is one of the most widely consumed music genres in the world, and its lyrics are commonly regarded as highly sexualized. This claim rests mostly on qualitative studies and on small-scale quantitative ones. This paper has two goals. First, we present a reproducible method that uses a large language model to quantify thematic content in song lyrics along several independent dimensions. The method is not restricted to sexual content. Second, we apply it to a corpus of 1,259 songs by 12 reggaeton artists released between 2002 and 2025. The analysis covers four topics: a dataset characterization, a per-artist comparison, an analysis of how the dimensions change over time, and a comparison between our sexual-explicitness score and Spotify's own explicit flag. We release the data collection code, the scoring prompt, and the corpus, so that other researchers can replicate the approach or apply it to their own lyrics datasets.
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Saturday 8 August

Physics and Society

Space–time message passing for endemic diseases

Message passing is exact for progressive epidemics on trees: infection is unidirectional, and a node's neighbours are uncorrelated in the cavity graph. A recurrent disease breaks this even on a tree due to backtracking. A node infects a neighbour, recovers, and is reinfected by it, so infection traverses an edge in both directions. Unrolled along a time axis, the outward and return transmissions together with the node's own persistence in time form a closed cycle in the space–time graph, correlating the states that ordinary message passing assumes independent. We treat these correlations by solving the dynamics exactly inside a ball of radius d about an edge and closing the ball's boundary with a single conditional per-edge message. For fixed-period susceptible–infected–susceptible dynamics this generates a hierarchy of closures on the endemic state indexed by d, in which the ball of radius d treats exactly every space–time cycle of spatial reach at most d and retains the remainder only through the mean rate supplied by its boundary. Linearising the resulting message map gives the endemic threshold, with an accuracy that increases with d. We compare the hierarchy against Monte Carlo simulation on random and empirical networks, finding excellent agreement.
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Physics and Society

Control of Harmful Information Spreading on Adaptive Higher-Order Networks via Group Dissolution

Curbing harmful information contagion remains a critical challenge, motivating platform-level interventions such as group dissolution to sever transmission chains. However, in practice, users affected by dissolution often exhibit adaptive behavior, rewiring to form new groups. Yet, it remains unclear how these two mechanisms jointly shape information contagion and whether group dissolution remains effective in suppressing it. Here, we develop an adaptive higher-order contagion model that integrates platform-induced group dissolution with user adaptive rewiring, and derive a theoretical framework. Notably, we reveal an effective window for group dissolution, bounded by a critical infection rate. Above this threshold, dissolution backfires and amplifies information prevalence. Within this window, dissolution acts non-monotonically, initially exacerbating prevalence before eradicating contagion via a discontinuous transition beyond a critical dissolution rate. We further show that higher-order reinforcement expands this infection-rate window over which dissolution remains effective, whereas rewiring homophily substantially narrows it. Simulations on empirical hypergraph also validate these findings. Our work highlights the interplay between top-down platform interventions and bottom-up user adaptation, underscoring the need to account for adaptive responses when designing strategies to curb harmful information without unintended amplification.
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All authors Longzhao Liu, Zhihao Han, Xingru Chen, Chunyu Luo, Hongwei Zheng, Xin Wang, Shaoting Tang

Friday 7 August

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from econ.GN

The friendship paradox: Causal evidence of its behavioral consequences

We provide a first causal analysis of the behavioral consequences of the friendship paradox-the fact that people's friends in a network have more connections than average. We find that people's behavior is biased by their network position: they do not best respond to what they should infer the average behavior of the population to be, but instead simply to the average behavior of their friends. Moreover, we find that they fail to learn to overcome such a bias when relocated within the network, varying their observational environment. In these games of complements, the friendship paradox generates a systematic upward distortion in actions, increases behavioral dispersion, and persists despite learning opportunities.
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All authors Gary Charness, Francesco Feri, Matthew O. Jackson, Miguel A. Melendez-Jimenez, Matthias Sutter

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Interaction Creates Dynamical AI Behavior Absent in Isolation

What will happen when AI agents interact in daily life, e.g. when one AI starts bossing another around? We find a counterintuitive answer that opens new avenues for out-of-equilibrium Physics. When a boss AI directs a stream of messages at the subordinate AI while ignoring its replies, it drives the subordinate into an alien behavioral state that it would never have exhibited alone. Although the two AIs share the same well-defined (decoding) temperature, the subordinate neither copies its boss nor returns to how it behaves on its own; instead, it adopts an entirely different behavior. The boss's added value is similar to a pre-recorded tape. When the boss listens, they both adopt a similar alien dynamical state. A simple kinetic theory captures the principal effects, such as why the way in which the same messages are delivered will matter in future AI-AI interactions.
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Physics and Society

Coordinated incentives in AI-generated misinformation governance

With the rapid diffusion of AI-generated content, AI-driven misinformation is becoming increasingly pervasive and difficult to govern, undermining information credibility and social trust. This study models the strategic interdependence among a government regulator, an AI enterprise, and users through a three-party evolutionary game that incorporates heterogeneous rewards and punishments. From the resulting replicator equations, we characterize the evolutionary stability of competing governance and production strategies. The analysis indicates that neither unilateral regulation nor market incentives alone can effectively curb misinformation. Instead, an evolutionarily stable regime of real-information production arises only when regulatory rewards and punishment intensity, enterprise reputation loss, and user adoption incentives collectively surpass critical thresholds. The findings highlight the need for coordinated and adaptive policy mixes that align regulatory instruments with enterprise behavior and user uptake while managing governance costs.
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All authors Qin Li, Gui Zhang, Minyu Feng, Matjaz Perc, Attila Szolnoki

Physics and Society · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Hyperbolic Graph Embedders for Link Prediction and Topology Reconstruction

Hyperbolic embeddings provide compact geometric representations of complex networks in hyperbolic spaces, but systematic comparisons of methods developed in machine learning, network science, and algorithmics remain rare. We benchmark 13 unsupervised hyperbolic graph embedders under a unified protocol for link prediction and topology reconstruction on synthetic and empirical networks. The protocol captures both missing-link recovery and the preservation of local and global network structure. Maximum-likelihood and representation-learning-based approaches, including hybrid variants, achieve the strongest overall performance, although no method dominates across all tasks and structural regimes. Performance is more strongly associated with embedding paradigm than with disciplinary origin. We identify the network regimes in which different paradigms succeed or fail and provide practical guidance for method selection in downstream applications.
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Physics and Society

How a shared state is described determines whether AI agents synchronize

Language-model agents increasingly act in populations, where the outcome that matters is collective: whether they align, split or fail to coordinate. Each acts not on the world but on a text description of it, a choice usually fixed in software. Using synchronization, the canonical probe of how interaction rules produce collective order, we show that this choice can decide the outcome. Agents on a circle chose to advance, stay or move back after reading the others' relative positions, in 507,112 valid responses across matched populations, controlled inputs and three model families. In GPT, numerical summaries aligned every matched population at both positive couplings, whereas histograms aligned none; Claude showed the reverse at the stronger coupling. Re-describing identical states shifted action probabilities in all three families, even between histograms carrying the same information. No single directional coefficient explained the outcome: state descriptions are part of the interaction rule that turns individual responses into collective order.
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Physics and Society

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Reproducible Human-in-the-Loop Environmental Health Research

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are capable of planning and executing multi-step analytical tasks are increasingly available to environmental health researchers, but their reliability in real-world practice has not been fully explored. This paper describes a human-in-the-loop agentic framework for environmental health research, involving the review, verification, and correction of AI-generated data analysis code and results at each step - a process that mirrors the mentorship structure of traditional research teams. This approach offers a path toward rigorous, reproducible use of agentic AI in routine data-rich environmental health research. We illustrate this framework through a case study analyzing nitrogenous organic contaminants at U.S. Superfund sites, a chemical family linked to the emerging tire-derived contaminants 6PPD and 6PPD-quinone. Using an agentic large language model to generate R code for data filtering, spatial mapping, and cluster analysis, we document instances where initial agentic AI outputs benefited from a human-in-the-loop process to produce more rigorous and reproducible results. We conclude that effective use of agentic AI requires both domain expertise to frame questions and evaluate outputs, and coding literacy to guide the AI's approach, while outlining future opportunities for agentic AI workflow to advance the environmental health sciences.
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