Others
This page collects the material that does not fit in a paper, such as interactive explainers, lay summaries, code and the seminar community, along with some odds and ends.
Interactive explainers
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Thermodynamic space of chemical reaction networks
This interactive companion to our Physical Review X paper has eight labs that show how the energy budget alone bounds every reaction affinity and every stationary concentration ratio, whatever the rate constants.
Notes
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Coding with GPT-4: Simulating Emergent Phenomena in Complex Systems
Browser simulations of the Vicsek flocking model, the XY model and phase separation, written with GPT-4 from plain-language instructions, and notes on how that went.
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Thermophoresis as an emergent phenomenon: the role of internal states
A lay summary of our New Journal of Physics paper: a particle that switches between internal states with different diffusion coefficients drifts in a temperature gradient, toward the cold or toward the warm side.
Community
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SPYC online seminar
Statistical Physics Youth Communications (统计物理青年通讯), the community of early-career researchers that Shiling Liang founded in 2022, has run this online seminar series in statistical and biological physics since 2023. Most talks are in Chinese.
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Swarma Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics Study Group
Lei-Han Tang, Jin Wang, Shiling Liang and Qian-Yuan Tang initiated this online reading group (非平衡统计物理读书会), which Swarma Club (集智俱乐部) hosted as a series of 16 sessions in 2024–2025. The sessions were in Chinese.
Software
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markov-response
This Python package by Ruicheng Bao and Shiling Liang covers spectral decomposition, first-passage times and the response to rate perturbations in continuous-time Markov chains. It accompanies arXiv:2412.19602 and is released under the MIT License.
In the media
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Rethinking Carnot: Scientists overcome traditional power-efficiency trade-off
Phys.org reported on our minimal model of a heat engine that approaches Carnot efficiency at maximum power (Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 027101, 2025).
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Chinese scientists crack code for heat engines with max power and efficiency
Interesting Engineering wrote about the same heat-engine model.
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No more engine trade-off: Chinese-led design breaks power, efficiency deadlock
The South China Morning Post covered the same heat-engine model.
Recorded talks
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Thermodynamic space of chemical reaction networks
Shiling Liang gave this talk at the online Autocatalysis in Reaction Networks Seminar in April 2025.
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Universal thermodynamic bounds on symmetry breaking in living systems: from error correction to pattern formation
This contributed talk was given at the Workshop on Stochastic Thermodynamics (WOST IV) at ICTP in Trieste in May 2023.
Theses and posters
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Fundamental Thermodynamic Constraints on Symmetry Breaking in Biochemical Systems
Shiling Liang defended this PhD thesis at EPFL in 2024 (thesis no. 10944), with Paolo De Los Rios and Daniel Maria Busiello as advisors.
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Non-Equilibrium Chemical Reactions Under Non-Isothermal Conditions: Kinetic Stabilization, Selection and Thermophoresis
Written in the Section of Physics at EPFL in 2020 under the supervision of Paolo De Los Rios and Daniel Maria Busiello, this master’s thesis is available as a 69-page PDF.
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Universal Thermodynamic Bounds on Symmetry Breaking in Living Systems
With Paolo De Los Rios and Daniel Maria Busiello, we made this A0 poster (PDF) on the work published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 228402 (2024).
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Emergent thermophoretic behavior in chemical reaction systems
This A0 poster (PDF), made with Daniel Maria Busiello and Paolo De Los Rios, is about our New J. Phys. paper (2022). It was shown at the (Post)modern Thermodynamics School & Workshop in Luxembourg in December 2022, and online at Molecular Origins of Life, Munich, in June 2023.