It is important to know whether the laws or phenomena in statistical physics for natural systems with non-adaptive agents still hold for social human systems with adaptive agents, because this implies whether it is possible to study or understand social human systems by using statistical physics originating from natural systems. For this purpose, we review the role of human adaptability in four kinds of specific human behaviors, namely, normal behavior, herd behavior, contrarian behavior, and hedge behavior. The approach is based on controlled experiments in the framework of market-directed resource-allocation games. The role of the controlled experiments could be at least two-fold： adopting the real human decision-making process so that the system under consideration could reflect the performance of genuine human beings; making it possible to obtain macroscopic physical properties of a human system by tuning a particular factor of the system, thus directly revealing cause and effect. As a result, both computer simulations and theoretical analyses help to show a few counterparts of some laws or phenomena in statistical physics for social human systems： two-phase phenomena or phase transitions, entropy-related phenomena, and a non-equilibrium steady state. This review highlights the role of human adaptability in these counterparts, and makes it possible to study or understand some particular social human systems by means of statistical physics coming from natural systems.
Based on a first-principles approach,we establish an alternating-current（AC） relaxation theory for a rotating metallic particle with complex dielectric constant εα=εα-iσα/ω0.Here εα is the real part,σα the conductivity,ω0 the angular frequency of an AC electric field,and i=-11/2.Our theory yields an accurate interparticle force,which is in good agreement with the existing experiment.The agreement helps to show that the relaxations of two kinds of charges,namely,surface polarized charges（described by εα） and free charges（corresponding to σα）,contribute to the unusually large reduction in the attracting interparticle force.This theory can be adopted to determine the relaxation time of dynamic particles in various fields.
Composite nanoparticles （NPs） have the ability of combining materials with different properties together, thus receiving extensive attention in many fields. Here we theoretically investigate the electric field distribution around core/shell NPs （a type of composite NPs） in ferrofluids under the influence of an external magnetic field. The NPs are made of cobalt （ferromagnetic） coated with gold （metallic）. Under the influence of the external magnetic field, these NPs will align along the direction of this field, thus forming a chain of NPs. According to Laplace＇s equations, we obtain electric fields inside and outside the NPs as a function of the incident wavelength by taking into account the mutual interaction between the polarized NPs. Our calculation results show that the electric field distribution is closely related to the resonant incident wavelength, the metallic shell thickness, and the inter-particle distance. These analytical calculations agree well with our numerical simulation results. This kind of field-induced anisotropic soft-matter systems offers the possibility of obtaining an enhanced Raman scattering substrate due to enhanced electric fields.
In financial markets, the relation between fluctuations of stock prices and trading behaviors is complex. It is intriguing to quantify this kind of meta-correlation between market fluctuations and the synchronous behaviors. We refine the theoretical index leverage model proposed by Reigneron et al., to exactly quantify the meta-correlation under various levels of price fluctuations [Reigneron P A, Allez R and Bouchaud J P 2011 Physica A 390 3026]. The characteristics of meta-correlations in times of market losses, are found to be significantly different in Chinese and American financial markets. In addition,unlike the asymmetric results at the daily scale, the correlation behaviors are found to be symmetric at the high-frequency scale.
