Physics of glassy and granular materials

Title

Glassy dynamics of population dynamics with selection

Speaker

Jorge Kurchan (ESPCI, Paris)

Abstract

We have considered a system of individuals that may be in many metastable states, each with different lifetimes and different fitness properties, as defined by the number of children made per unit time. We show that under very mild assumptions, such a population exhibits a glass transition induced by selection. Thus, the population `ages', in the sense that one may perform simple experiments to determine the time elapsed after the system was prepared, even if individuals are themselves not modified.