PhD Project: Emergence and extreme events in real world complex systems
Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics for 2015
Supervisor: S. C. Chapman
Research at Warwick University’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) focuses on
plasma physics applied to the grand challenges of fusion energy, space physics, solar physics, and
astrophysics. Our work spans fundamental theory, observation, and the analysis of experimental
data, combined with high performance computing. For more details of the CFSA see
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/cfsa/
Current CFSA PhD students are supported financially from a broad range of sources in addition to
the UK Research Councils EPSRC and STFC. At present these include Scholarships from the
Governments of Chile and Mexico, Warwick Postgraduate Scholarships, and partnership
arrangements with UK national laboratories. Active research collaborations with large facilities and
space observatories are a distinctive feature of PhD research within CFSA.
The project: Complex systems, that is, systems composed of many interacting elements, can exhibit
collective behavior which is emergent: it cannot be predicted by knowledge of how single elements
behave. This emergent behaviour can lead to extreme events, examples of which are stampedes
leading to stock price crashes, and atmospheric blocking patterns leading to heatwaves.
Understanding the relationship between emergence and extreme events as seen in the far from
perfect observations of ‘real world’ natural and societal systems is a particularly pressing challenge.
This project is to explore this relationship in the context of systems that are undergoing slow change;
to answer the question, as the system’s driving is changing, are extreme events becoming more
likely or more intense? The underlying ideas that will be developed in this project are of generic
application. Examples of applications which can be pursued as part of the project are (i) solar and
magnetospheric activity (space weather) and how it varies with the solar cycle (ii) extreme events in
weather as earth’s climate is changed (iii) bursty energy release in magnetically confined plasmas for
fusion.
This project benefits from Chapman’s collaborations though EPSRC’s funded
networks: Network+ on Emergence and Physics Far From Equilibrium and CliMathNet,
and also collaborations with end users through the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, CCFE Culham
and the London School of Economics.