Tuesday, October 23, 2012

1210.5819 (Jacopo Grilli et al.)

Absence of Detailed Balance in Ecology    [PDF]

Jacopo Grilli, Sandro Azaele, Jayanth R. Banavar, Amos Maritan
Living systems are typically characterized by irreversible processes. A condition equivalent to the reversibility is the detailed balance, whose absence is an obstacle for analytically solving ecological models. We revisit a promising model with an elegant field-theoretic analytic solution and show that the theoretical analysis is invalid because of an implicit assumption of detailed balance. A signature of the difficulties is evident in the inconsistencies appearing in the many-point correlation functions and in the analytical formula for the species area relationship.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5819

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