Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo
Departament de Física i Enginyeria Nuclear

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Research statement

Nature is dynamic. From celestial bodies orbiting around each other and emitting radiation in a pulsed manner to the ever changing climate and geology of our own planet, and all the way to living systems, which exhibit all kinds of rhythmic behavior, natural phenomena are governed by the laws of dynamical systems. Nonlinearities in the interactions between the system components and in the response to external perturbations, together with random fluctuations both intrinsic and extrinsic to the system, complicate our understanding of the dynamic world. The goal of our lab is to study and characterize the dynamical behavior of natural systems, and use this knowledge to understand how these systems operate and self-organize in complex yet well-coordinated processes.

The phenomena that we study include synchronization, noise-induced phenomena, pattern formation, excitability, and limit-cycle behavior, among others. The natural systems whose behavior we examine include bacteria, stem cells, the immune system, the brain, and technologically relevant systems such as lasers and nonlinear electronic circuits. In these systems we explore processes such as gene regulation, intra- and inter-cellular signaling, brain oscillations, and communications using chaos.