Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 
 Postdoc Nominations 
 Student Requests 
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Monday, August 31, 2015
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

Extinction of established populations: A physicist's view

Baruch Meerson
Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Extinction of a long-lived self-regulating population is a dramatic effect. It can result from a rare large fluctuation coming from the discreteness of individuals and stochasticity of their births, deaths and interactions. It also epitomizes the importance of rare events. Predicting the mean time to extinction accurately is important in many applications. Examples include assessment of viability of small populations, and evaluation of the lifetime of an infectious disease in a community. I will show how one can use a variant of WKB approximation that originates in quantum mechanics and other areas of physics, to calculate the mean time to extinction of a stochastic population. In this framework the most likely path of the population to extinction is described by an instanton-like trajectory of an underlying classical Hamiltonian.

Host: Eli Ben-Naim