Emergence of Complex Structures

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified framework combining phase-space dynamics, transport geometry, and information theory to explain how complex structures emerge from homogeneous states, highlighting the role of nonlocality and self-organization.

Contribution

It introduces a geometric and coarse-grained approach to understanding structure formation, emphasizing the interplay of nonlocal transport, anisotropy, and entropy.

Findings

Density amplification governed by Jacobian of deformation

Anisotropic collapse from deformation tensor eigenvalues

Nonlocal interactions influence structure growth at moderate overdensity

Abstract

Complex structures often emerge from initially homogeneous or weakly correlated states. We address the apparent tension between this ordering and entropy growth through a unified framework combining semi-microscopic phase-space dynamics, transport geometry, information theory, and coarse-grained effective modeling. The key point is that entropy depends on the level of description: a coarse-grained spatial field may become more ordered as structure forms, even while the full phase-space description becomes more complex through shell crossing, multistreaming, and the activation of velocity degrees of freedom. Using a Lagrangian--Eulerian transport map, we show how density amplification is governed by the Jacobian of the deformation and how anisotropic collapse arises from the eigenvalues of a hierarchy of deformation tensors. Long-range interaction or information flow is encoded in the displacement field, so that nonlocality enters directly through transport. We connect this geometric description to a maximum-entropy Gaussian baseline and show how nonlinear transport and nonlocal coupling generate scale coupling, higher-order correlations, and non-Gaussianity. We then formulate a Landau--Ginzburg description in which the growth of seed anisotropies is interpreted as the activation of lower effective free-energy branches, providing a coarse-grained realization of self-organization. Applied to generated cosmological fields, this framework indicates that the nonlocal tidal level becomes relevant already at moderate overdensity. Although cosmological structure formation is the main realization considered here, the framework is intended more broadly as a mesoscopic language for systems in which transport, anisotropy, nonlocality, and self-organization are central.