Publications by Amos Maritan | EPFL Graph Search

Fluctuations of entropy production of a run-and-tumble particle

Deepak Gupta, Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

Out-of-equilibrium systems continuously generate entropy, with its rate of production being a fingerprint of nonequilibrium conditions. In small-scale dissipative systems subject to thermal noise, fluctuations of entropy production are significant. Hithert ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2023

Information-driven transitions in projections of underdamped dynamics

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello, Giorgio Nicoletti

Low-dimensional representations of underdamped systems often provide useful insights and analytical tractability. Here, we build such representations via information projections, obtaining an optimal model that captures the most information on observed spa ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Seeing the forest for the trees through metabolic scaling

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

We demonstrate that when power scaling occurs for an individual tree and in a forest, there is great resulting simplicity notwithstanding the underlying complexity characterizing the system over many size scales. Our scaling framework unifies seemingly dis ...

2022

True scale-free networks hidden by finite size effects

Andrea Rinaldo, Samir Suweis, Amos Maritan

We analyze about 200 naturally occurring networks with distinct dynamical origins to formally test whether the commonly assumed hypothesis of an underlying scale-free structure is generally viable. This has recently been questioned on the basis of statisti ...

National Academy of Sciences2021

Coarse-grained entropy production with multiple reservoirs: Unraveling the role of time scales and detailed balance in biology-inspired systems

Deepak Gupta, Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

A general framework to describe a vast majority of biology-inspired systems is to model them as stochastic processes in which multiple couplings are in play at the same time. Molecular motors, chemical reaction networks, catalytic enzymes, and particles ex ...

2020

Entropy production in systems with unidirectional transitions

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

The entropy production is one of the most essential features for systems operating out of equilibrium. The formulation for discrete-state systems goes back to the celebrated Schnakenberg's work and hitherto can be carried out when for each transition betwe ...

2020

On the probabilistic nature of the species-area relation

Andrea Rinaldo, Jonathan Giezendanner, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

The Species-Area Relation (SAR), which describes the increase in the number of species S with increasing area A, is under intense scrutiny in contemporary ecology, in particular to probe its reliability in predicting the number of species going extinct as ...

2019

Generalized size scaling of metabolic rates based on single-cell measurements with freshwater phytoplankton

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Silvia Zaoli, Emilio Marañón

Kleiber's law describes the scaling of metabolic rate with body size across several orders of magnitude in size and across taxa and is widely regarded as a fundamental law in biology. The physiological origins of Kleiber's law are still debated and general ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

Entropy production for coarse-grained dynamics

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

Systems out of equilibrium exhibit a net production of entropy. We study the dynamics of a stochastic system represented by a Master equation (ME) that can be modeled by a Fokker-Planck equation in a coarse-grained, mesoscopic description. We show that the ...

2019

Entropy production in master equations and Fokker-Planck equations: facing the coarse-graining and recovering the information loss

Amos Maritan, Daniel Maria Busiello

Systems operating out of equilibrium exchange energy and matter with the environment, thus producing entropy in their surroundings. Since the entropy production depends on the current flowing throughout the system, its quantification is affected by the lev ...

2019

River landscapes and optimal channel networks

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Amos Maritan

2018

Covariations in ecological scaling laws fostered by community dynamics

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Silvia Zaoli

Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and theoreticians. Empirical evi ...

2017

Generalized receptor law governs phototaxis in the phytoplankton Euglena gracilis

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

Phototaxis, the process through which motile organisms direct their swimming toward or away from light, is implicated in key ecological phenomena (including algal blooms and diel vertical migration) that shape the distribution, diversity, and productivity ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Sample and population exponents of generalized Taylor's law

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto

Taylor's law (TL) states that the variance V of a nonnegative random variable is a power function of its mean M; i.e., V = aM(b). TL has been verified extensively in ecology, where it applies to population abundance, physics, and other natural sciences. It ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Resilience and reactivity of global food security

Andrea Rinaldo, Samir Suweis, Paolo d'Odorico, Amos Maritan

The escalating food demand by a growing and increasingly affluent global population is placing unprecedented pressure on the limited land and water resources of the planet, underpinning concerns over global food security and its sensitivity to shocks arisi ...

National Academy of Sciences2015

Evolution and selection of river networks: Statics, dynamics, and complexity

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

Moving from the exact result that drainage network configurations minimizing total energy dissipation are stationary solutions of the general equation describing landscape evolution, we review the static properties and the dynamic origins of the scale-inva ...

National Academy of Sciences2014

Form, function, and evolution of living organisms

Andrea Rinaldo, Amos Maritan

Despite the vast diversity of sizes and shapes of living organisms, life's organization across scales exhibits remarkable commonalities, most notably through the approximate validity of Kleiber's law, the power law scaling of metabolic rates with the mass ...

National Academy of Sciences2014

From the Cover: Water-controlled wealth of nations

Andrea Rinaldo, Samir Suweis, Paolo d'Odorico, Amos Maritan

Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. At a country level, some populations use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water requ ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

Scaling body size fluctuations

Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Carrara, Amos Maritan, Andrea Giometto, Florian Altermatt

The size of an organism matters for its metabolic, growth, mortality, and other vital rates. Scale-free community size spectra (i.e., size distributions regardless of species) are routinely observed in natural ecosystems and are the product of intra- and i ...

National Academy of Sciences2013

On species persistence-time distributions

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Samir Suweis, Lorenzo Mari, Amos Maritan

We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction in a given geogra ...

Elsevier2012