A bidimensional cellular automaton model is used to simulate the process of evacuation of pedestrians in a room with fixed obstacles. A floor field is defined so that moving to a cell with lower floor field means approaching an exit door. The model becomes non-deterministic by introducing a ''panic'' parameter, given by a probability of not moving, and by a random choice to resolve conflicts in the update of pedestrian positions. Two types of exit doors are considered: single (where only one person can pass) and double (two persons can pass simultaneously). For a double door, the longest evacuation time turns out to occur for a very traditional location of the door. The optimum door position is determined. Replacing the double door by two single doors does not improve evacuation times noticeably. On the other hand, for a room without obstacles, a simple scaling law is proposed to model the dependence of evacuation time with the number of persons and exit width. This model fails when obstacles are present, as their presence introduces local bottlenecks whose effect outweighs the benefits of increasing door width beyond a certain threshold. r

Observed electron velocity distributions in the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind exhibit a variety of nonthermal features which deviate from thermal equilibrium, for example, in the form of temperature anisotropies, suprathermal tail extensions, and field-aligned beams. The state close to thermal equilibrium and its departure from it provides a source for spontaneous emissions of electromagnetic fluctuations, such as the whistler. Here we present a comparative analysis of the electron whistler-cyclotron and firehose fluctuations based upon anisotropic plasma modeled with Maxwellian and Tsallis-kappa-like particle distributions, to explain the correspondence relationship of the magnetic fluctuations as a function of the electron temperature and thermal anisotropy in the solar wind and magnetosphere plasmas. The analysis presented here considers correlation theory of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem and the dispersion relation of transverse fluctuations, with wave vectors parallel to the uniform background magnetic field, in a finite temperature anisotropic thermal bi-Maxwellian and nonthermal Tsallis-kappa-like magnetized electron-proton plasma. Dispersion analysis and stability thresholds are derived for these thermal and nonthermal distributions using plasma and field parameters relevant to the solar wind and magnetosphere environments. Our results indicate that there is an enhancement of the fluctuations level in the case of nonthermal distributions due to the effective higher temperature and the excess of suprathermal particles. These results suggest that a comparison of the electromagnetic fluctuations due to thermal and nonthermal distributions provides a diagnostic signature by which inferences about the nature of the particle velocity distribution function can be ascertained without in situ particle measurements.

International audienceAcoustic emission (AE) and infrared thermography (IT) are simultaneously combined to identify damage evolution in carbon fibre reinforced composites. Samples are subjected to tensile static loads while acoustic emission sensors and an infrared camera record the acoustic signals and the temperature variations respectively. Unsupervised pattern recognition procedure is applied to identify damage mechanisms from acoustic signals. Thermodynamic arguments are introduced to estimate global heat source fields from thermal measurements and anisotropic heat conduction behavior is taken into account by means of homogenization technique. A spatial and time analysis of acoustic events and heat sources is developed and some correlation range in the AE and IT events amplitude are identified

A kinetic description of Alfvén-cyclotron magnetic fluctuations for anisotropic electron-proton quasistable plasmas is studied. An analytical treatment, based on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, consistently shows that spontaneous fluctuations in plasmas with stable distributions significantly contribute to the observed magnetic fluctuations in the solar wind, as seen, for example, in [S. D. Bale et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 211101 (2009)], even far below from the instability thresholds. Furthermore, these results, which do not require any adjustable parameters or wave excitations, are consistent with the results provided by hybrid simulations. It is expected that this analysis contributes to our understanding of the nature of magnetic fluctuations in the solar wind.

We develop a nonlinear theory for self-modulation of a circularly polarized electromagnetic wave in a relativistic hot weakly magnetized electron-positron plasma. The case of parallel propagation along an ambient magnetic field is considered. A nonlinear Schrödinger equation is derived for the complex wave amplitude of a selfmodulated wave packet. We show that the maximum growth rate of the modulational instability decreases as the temperature of the pair plasma increases. Depending on the initial conditions, the unstable wave envelope can evolve nonlinearly to either periodic wave trains or solitary waves. This theory has application to high-energy astrophysics and high-power laser physics.

Citation:Domínguez, M., V. Muñoz, and J. A. Valdivia (2014), Temporal evolution of fractality in the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar photosphere, Abstract The study of complexity in two aspects of the magnetic activity in the Sun-Earth system is presented. We compare the temporal evolution of the magnetic fluctuations in the Earth's magnetosphere and the spatial distribution of the magnetic field in the solar photosphere, by calculating fractal dimensions from the data. It is found that the fractal dimension of the Dst data decreases during magnetic storm states and is well correlated with other indexes of solar activity, such as the solar flare and coronal indexes. This correlation holds for individual storms, full-year data, and the complete 23rd solar cycle. The fractal dimension from solar magnetogram data also correlates well with both the Dst index and solar flare index, although the correlation is much more clear at the larger temporal scale of the 23rd solar cycle, showing a clear increase around solar maximum.The main objective of this work is to characterize the occurrence of events such as geomagnetic storms and solar flares by means of a fractal dimension, as a way to measure the complexity of magnetic field time series and spatial patterns. In this context, we analyze the possible time correlation between the calculated fractal dimensions and various indexes of geomagnetic and solar dynamics.In particular, we calculate a box-counting fractal dimension [Addison, 1997], because of its simplicity and its intuitive meaning. Although the box-counting algorithm can provide only partial information on the complexity of the systems, in particular when they also exhibit multifractality as in our case, it is able to describe some features of solar and geomagnetic complexity as we will show below, and in fact it has also been successfully used in other studies of the Sun-Earth system [Osella et al.

The magnetosphere is a complex system, with multi-scale spatio-temporal behavior. Self-organization is a possible solution to two seemingly contradicting observations: (a) the repeatable and coherent substorm phenomena, and, (b) the underlying selfsimilar turbulent behavior in the plasma sheet. Such states, are seen to emerge naturally in a plasma physics model with sporadic dissipation, through spatio-temporal chaos.

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