Collective behavior of animals is a fascinating example of self-organization in biology. This phenomenon is believed to provide several advantages to individuals, such as facilitating exchange of social information, promoting accurate collective decisions, or affording protection from predators. It has been theorized that animal collectives should operate in a special parameter region close to...
Nonequilibrium complex systems often exhibit a hierarchical structure of different dynamics on different time scales. The statistical nature of spatiotemporal fluctuations relevant to the dynamics is known to be of central importance for treating a wide class of such systems. Maximum entropy principle has been the crux for describing the fluctuation distribution in the literature, beyond the...
The heat exchange fluctuation theorem (XFT) by Jarzynski and Wojcik [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 230602 (2004)] addresses the setting where two systems with different temperatures are brought in thermal contact at time $t=0$ and then disconnected at later time $\tau$. The theorem asserts that the probability of an anomalous heat flux (from cold to hot), while nonzero, is exponentially smaller than...
