Emergent information dynamics in many-body interconnected systems

Abstract

The information implicitly represented in the state of physical systems allows one to analyze them with analytical techniques from statistical mechanics and information theory. In the case of complex networks such techniques are inspired by quantum statistical physics and have been used to analyze biophysical systems, from virus-host protein-protein interactions to whole-brain models of humans in health and disease. Here, instead of node-node interactions, we focus on the flow of information between network configurations. Our numerical results unravel fundamental differences between widely used spin models on networks, such as voter and kinetic dynamics, which cannot be found from classical node-based analysis. Our model opens the door to adapting powerful analytical methods from quantum many-body systems to study the interplay between structure and dynamics in interconnected systems.