Thermodynamics of percolation in interacting systems

Abstract: Interacting systems can be studied as the networks where nodes are system units and edges denote correlated interactions. Although percolation on network is a unified way to model the emergence and propagation of correlated behaviours, it remains unknown how the dynamics characterized by percolation is related to the thermodynamics of phase transitions. It is non-trivial to formalize thermodynamics for most complex systems, not to mention calculating thermodynamic quantities and verifying scaling relations during percolation. In this work, we develop a formalism to quantify the thermodynamics of percolation in interacting systems, which is rooted in a discovery that percolation transition is a process for the system to lose the freedom degrees associated with ground state configurations. We derive asymptotic formulas to accurately calculate entropy and specific heat under our framework, which enables us to detect phase transitions and demonstrate the Rushbrooke equality (i.e., $\alpha+2\beta+\gamma=2$) in six representative complex systems (e.g., Bernoulli and bootstrap percolation, classical and quantum synchronization, non-linear oscillations with damping, and cellular morphogenesis). These results suggest the general applicability of our framework in analyzing diverse interacting systems and percolation processes.