Ferromagnetic models for cooperative behavior: Revisiting Universality in complex phenomena

TL;DR

This paper revisits ferromagnetic models within statistical mechanics, demonstrating their broad applicability across diverse complex phenomena in sociology, chemistry, cybernetics, and biology, highlighting their unifying role.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of ferromagnetic models embedded on random graphs and illustrates their relevance in multiple research fields beyond physics.

Findings

Models effectively capture complex phenomena across disciplines

Reveals universality in cooperative behavior modeling

Highlights importance of statistical mechanics in interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Ferromagnetic models are harmonic oscillators in statistical mechanics. Beyond their original scope in tackling phase transition and symmetry breaking in theoretical physics, they are nowadays experiencing a renewal applicative interest as they capture the main features of disparate complex phenomena, whose quantitative investigation in the past were forbidden due to data lacking. After a streamlined introduction to these models, suitably embedded on random graphs, aim of the present paper is to show their importance in a plethora of widespread research fields, so to highlight the unifying framework reached by using statistical mechanics as a tool for their investigation. Specifically we will deal with examples stemmed from sociology, chemistry, cybernetics (electronics) and biology (immunology).