Research Interests

There are a host of natural and social phenomena of which the complexity arises not from their constituents being complex, but by the nonlinear and collective interactions of rather simple elements. Such phenomena are often characterized by scaling and universal properties, and hence can best be understood by methods of statistical physics, which have been developed mostly for addressing such properties.

In recent years, we have studied various problems of that nature.

Selected recent publications (more...)

• Tri-critical behavior in rupture induced by disorder,
  J.V. Andersen, D. Sornette and K.-t. Leung, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 2140 (1997)
• Drifting spatial structures in a system with Oppositely driven species,
  K.-t. Leung and R.K.P. Zia, Phys. Rev. E 56, 308 (1997). More details
• Self-organized criticality in stick-slip models with periodic boundaries,
  K.-t. Leung, J.V. Andersen, and D. Sornette, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1916 (1998). More details
• Non-trivial stochastic resonance temperature for the kinetic Ising models,
  K.-t. Leung and Z. Neda, Phys. Rev. E 59, 2730 (1999). More details
• Anisotropic Finite-size scaling analysis of a three-dimensional driven diffusive system,
  K.-t. Leung and J.S. Wang, Int. J. Mod. Phys. C 10, 853 (1999).
  Also e-print cond-mat/9805285. More details
• Pattern formation and selection in quasi-static fracture,
  K.-t. Leung and Z. Neda, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 662 (2000).
  Also e-print cond-mat/0006061. More details
• Heuristic derivation of continuum kinetic equations from microscopic dynamics,
  K.-t. Leung, Phys. Rev. E 63, 016102 (2001).
  Also e-print cond-mat/0006217.
• Spiral cracks without twisting,
  K.-t. Leung, L. Jozsa, M. Ravasz and Z. Neda, Nature 410, 166 (2001). More details
  Also e-print cond-mat/0103221.
• Spiral cracks in drying precipitates,
  Z. Neda, K.-t. Leung, L. Jozsa, M. Ravasz, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 095502 (2002). More details
  Also e-print cond-mat/0201272.

Extracurricular Interests