Life and Death near a Windy Oasis
| dc.creator | Dahmen, Karin A. | |
| dc.creator | Nelson, David R. | |
| dc.creator | Shnerb, Nadav M. | |
| dc.date | 1998-07-30 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T03:11:10Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T03:11:10Z | |
| dc.description | We propose a simple experiment to study delocalization and extinction in inhomogeneous biological systems. The nonlinear steady state for, say, a bacteria colony living on and near a patch of nutrient or favorable illumination (``oasis'') in the presence of a drift term (``wind'') is computed. The bacteria, described by a simple generalization of the Fisher equation, diffuse, divide A -> A+A, die A -> 0, and annihilate A+A -> 0. At high wind velocities all bacteria are blown into an unfavorable region (``desert''), and the colony dies out. At low velocity a steady state concentration survives near the oasis. In between these two regimes there is a critical velocity at which bacteria first survive. If the ``desert'' supports a small nonzero population, this extinction transition is replaced by a delocalization transition with increasing velocity. Predictions for the behavior as a function of wind velocity are made for one and two dimensions. | |
| dc.description | 18 pages, 9 figures | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9807394 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9807394 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/28476 | |
| dc.subject | Disordered Systems and Neural Networks | |
| dc.subject | Quantitative Biology | |
| dc.title | Life and Death near a Windy Oasis | |
| dc.type | text |