Among the properties that are common to complex systems, the presence of critical thresholds in the dynamics of the system is one of the most important. Recently, there has been interest in the universalities that occur in the behavior of systems near critical points. These universal properties make it possible to estimate how far a system is from a critical threshold. Several early-warning signals have been reported in time series representing systems near catastrophic shifts. The proper understanding of these early-warnings may allow the prediction and perhaps control of these dramatic shifts in a wide variety of systems. In this paper we analyze this universal behavior for a system that is a paradigm of phase transitions, the Ising model. We study the behavior of the early-warning signals and the way the temporal correlations of the system increase when the system is near the critical point.

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) affects the cardiovascular response of patients. To study this effect, interbeat intervals (IBI) and beat-to-beat systolic blood pressure (SBP) variability of patients during supine, standing and controlled breathing tests were analyzed in the time domain. Simultaneous noninvasive measurements of IBI and SBP for 30 recently diagnosed and 15 long-standing DM patients were compared with the results for 30 rigorously screened healthy subjects (control). A statistically significant distinction between control and diabetic subjects was provided by the standard deviation and the higher moments of the distributions (skewness, and kurtosis) with respect to the median. To compare IBI and SBP for different populations, we define a parameter, α, that combines the variability of the heart rate and the blood pressure, as the ratio of the radius of the moments for IBI and the same radius for SBP. As diabetes evolves, α decreases, standard deviation of the IBI detrended signal diminishes (heart rate signal becomes more “rigid”), skewness with respect to the median approaches zero (signal fluctuations gain symmetry), and kurtosis increases (fluctuations concentrate around the median). Diabetes produces not only a rigid heart rate, but also increases symmetry and has leptokurtic distributions. SBP time series exhibit the most variable behavior for recently diagnosed DM with platykurtic distributions. Under controlled breathing, SBP has symmetric distributions for DM patients, while control subjects have non-zero skewness. This may be due to a progressive decrease of parasympathetic and sympathetic activity to the heart and blood vessels as diabetes evolves.

A fundamental relation exists between the statistical properties of the fluctuations of the energy-level spectrum of a Hamiltonian and the chaotic properties of the physical system it describes. This relationship has been addressed previously as a signature of chaos in quantum dynamical systems. In order to properly analyze these fluctuations, however, it is necessary to separate them from the general tendency, namely, its secular part. Unfortunately this process, called unfolding, is not trivial and can lead to erroneous conclusions about the chaoticity of a system. In this paper we propose a technique to improve the unfolding procedure for the purpose of minimizing the dependence on the particular procedure. This technique is based on detrending the fluctuations of the unfolded spectra through the empirical mode decomposition method.

We present arguments which indicate that a transitional state in between two different regimes implies the occurrence of 1/f time series and that this property is generic in both classical and quantum systems. Our study focuses on two particular examples: the one-dimensional module-1 logistic map and nuclear excitation spectra obtained with a schematic shell-model Hamiltonian. We suggest that a transitional point is characterized by the long-range correlations implied by 1/f time series. We apply a Fourier spectral analysis and the detrended fluctuation analysis method to study the fluctuations to each system.

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