A framework towards understanding mesoscopic phenomena: Emergent unpredictability, symmetry breaking and dynamics across scales

Abstract: By integrating 4 lines of thoughts: symmetry breaking originally advanced by Anderson, bifurcation from nonlinear dynamics, Landau's theory of phase transition, and the mechanism of emergent rare events studied by Kramers, we introduce a possible framework for understanding mesoscopic dynamics that links (i) fast lower level microscopic motions, (ii) movements within each basin at the mid-level, and (iii) higher-level rare transitions between neighboring basins, which have rates that decrease exponentially with the size of the system. In this mesoscopic framework, multiple attractors arise as emergent properties of the nonlinear systems. The interplay between the stochasticity and nonlinearity leads to successive jump-like transitions among different basins. We argue each transition is a dynamic symmetry breaking, with the potential of exhibiting Thom-Zeeman catastrophe as well as phase transition with the breakdown of ergodicity (e.g., cell differentiation). The slow-time dynamics of the nonlinear mesoscopic system is not deterministic, rather it is a discrete stochastic jump process. The existence of these discrete states and the Markov transitions among them are both emergent phenomena. This emergent stochastic jump dynamics then serves as the stochastic element for the nonlinear dynamics of a higher level aggregates on an even larger spatial and slower time scales (e.g., evolution). This description captures the hierarchical structure outlined by Anderson and illustrates two distinct types of limit of a mesoscopic dynamics: A long-time ensemble thermodynamics in terms of time $t$ tending infinity followed by the size of the system $N$ tending infinity, and a short-time trajectory steady state with $N$ tending infinity followed by $t$ tending infinity. With these limits, symmetry breaking and cusp catastrophe are two perspectives of the same mesoscopic system on different time scales.