Jürgen Kurths - Selected publications#

List of publications

In many instances Prof. Dr. J. Kurths has discovered and identified several new phenomena and has initiated new research directions in physics which as well have triggered applications in various fields, ranging from physics and chemistry via neuroscience and cardiology and more recently also to geosciences.

Some pertinent scientific gems of his are:

His seminal paper:

[1] M.G. Rosenblum, A.S. Pikovsky and J. Kurths, Phase Synchronization of Chaotic Oscillators, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 1804-1807 (1996) (> 1100 citations).

Huygen's discovery of phase synchronization of coupled pendulum clocks was generalized therein to the case of coupled complex systems. This paper has created a new direction in nonlinear dynamics. This new phenomenon has been experimentally verified in many systems, to mention only lasers, electrochemistry, or convection but has also been found in various natural systems such as coupled neurons, eye movement during reading, or interactions among El Nino and Indian Monsoon. This influential paper was extensively reviewed in Physics Today.

A prominent application in cardiology was initiated with:

[2] C. Schafer, M.G. Rosenblum, J. Kurths and H. Abel, Heartbeat synchronized with ventilation, NATURE 392, 239-240 (1998) (> 300 citations),

where the complex interaction between human heartbeat and breathing was identified quantitatively via the concept of complex phase by introducing the synchrogram technique. This has induced a lot of studies on the cardiovascular system and other physiological systems.

Recently, a new test statistics of the phase dynamics based on twin surrogates has been published in

[3] P. van Leeuwen, D. Geue, M. Thiel, D. Cysarz, S. lange, M. Romano, N. Wessel, J. Kurths and D. Gronemeier, Influence of paced maternal breathing on fetal- maternal heart rate coordination, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sc. U.S.A. 106, 13661-13666 (2009) (incl. a commentary about)

This work allows one to obtain a new and non-invasive insight into the complex interaction among mother and fetus by analyzing magnetocardiographic data. This approach could establish a new diagnostics of pregnant women.

The theory of synchronization and its applications as presented in the seminal text book:

[4] A. Pikovsky, M. Rosenblum and J. Kurths, Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2001) (> 1500 citations)

This book is widely known, often cited and serves as the "Source" in this field. In addition, this monograph (which received glowing reviews in numerous journals such as NATURE, or Physics Today, and praise from world leading experts in the field) has been translated since into Russian, Japanese and Italian.

The outstanding review

[5] S. Boccaletti, J. Kurths, G. Osipov, D. Valladares and C. Zhou, The _ Synchronization of Chaotic Systems, Phys. Rep. 366, 1-101 (2002) (> 700 citations)

does summarize basic features of complex synchronization especially in lattices and extended pattern forming systems.

A new phenomenon ("coherence resonance”) for the constructive role noise in nonlinear dynamical systems has been identified with

[6] A.S. Pikovsky and J. Kurths, Coherence Resonance in a Noise-Driven Excitable System, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 775-778 (1997) (> 600 citations)

where noise-induced oscillations can be observed in absence of external periodic forcing. This new phenomenon has been afterwards experimentally verified in lasers, ion channels, neurons, membranes and various other nonlinear systems. This phenomenon parallels in impact the related phenomenon of "Stochastic Resonance”.

Symbolic dynamics a basic concept in nonlinear dynamics has been applied to data analysis in

[7] J. Kurths, A. Voss, P. Saparin, Quantitative Analysis of Heart Rate Variability, CHAOS 5, 88-94 (1995) (> 190 citations)

Here, new kinds of measures of complexity basing on symbolic dynamics have been proposed and successfully applied to the risk identification for some severe heart diseases. This has inspired new theoretical work on such kind of measures and gave rise to various applications in cardiology and other fields of medicine. This paper was reviewed in Scientific Int. Journ.

Poincare' was the first to realize in 1890 that recurrence is a basic property of dynamical systems. Eckmann et al. (1987) used this for proposing recurrence plots providing an estimate of Lyapunov exponents. In the work

[8] N. Marwan, M. Romano, M. Thiel and J. Kurths, Recurrence Plots for the Analysis of Complex Systems, Phys. Rep. 438, 240-329 (2007) (> 110 citations)

this very approach has been substantially generalized for treating a broad spectrum of problems in data analysis. It has been shown that recurrence plots contain comprehensive information about dynamical systems. This item has ignited a vivid activity in applying the scheme to experimental data in medicine, geosciences, chemistry, physics, etc.

In the last decade it has been shown that networks with complex topology have an important potential to model various large complex systems. However, most studies

so far are restricted to static and non—weighted connectivity, which is not fulfilled in many applications. Therefore, with his study in

[9] C.S. Zhou, A.E. Motter and J. Kurths, Universality in the Synchronization of Weighted Random Networks, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 034lOl (2006) ( > 120 citations)

he has analyzed complex structure formation on weighted networks and has identified general necessary conditions for synchronization to take place on such networks.

Recently, he and co-authors generalized this concept by means of extending the concept to evolving complex networks with the seminal paper

[10] J. Donges, N. Marwan, Y. Zou and J. Kurths, The backbone ofthe climate network, Europhys. Lett. 87, 48007 (2009).

This new technique has been successfully applied to the climate system. It has enabled to uncover substantial changes in the network structure, especially the changes of tipping points, corresponding to the climate system during the last decades. This approach indeed is very promising for understanding and modeling climate changes and their impacts.