Universal gap scaling in percolation

  • Jingfang Fan
  • , Jun Meng
  • , Yang Liu
  • , Abbas Ali Saberi
  • , Jürgen Kurths
  • , Jan Nagler

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

44 Scopus citations

Abstract

Universality is a principle that fundamentally underlies many critical phenomena, ranging from epidemic spreading to the emergence or breakdown of global connectivity in networks. Percolation, the transition to global connectedness on gradual addition of links, may exhibit substantial gaps in the size of the largest connected network component. We uncover that the largest gap statistics is governed by extreme-value theory. This allows us to unify continuous and discontinuous percolation by virtue of universal critical scaling functions, obtained from normal and extreme-value statistics. Specifically, we show that the universal scaling function of the size of the largest gap is given by the extreme-value Gumbel distribution. This links extreme-value statistics to universality and criticality in percolation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)455-461
Number of pages7
JournalNature Physics
Volume16
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2020
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.

Funding

We acknowledge the ‘East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities — EPICC’ project, which is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is leading the execution of the project together with its project partners The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). A.A.S. acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and partial financial support from the research council of the University of Tehran.

Funders
Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
University of Tehran
Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz, Bau und Reaktorsicherheit

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