7 papers
Physical limits to concentration and gradient sensing by perfect monitors
Farshid Jafarpour
Cells often estimate chemical concentrations from only a few diffusing molecules, whose stochastic motion limits sensing precision. We consider a perfect monitoring instrument that…
Exactly Solvable Population Model with Square-Root Growth Noise and Cell-Size Regulation
Farshid Jafarpour
Stochastic exponential growth is nearly ubiquitous across cellular life, but how its microscopic noise structure shapes population growth remains poorly understood. Here, we introd…
Probing the Critical Point (CritPt) of AI Reasoning: a Frontier Physics Research Benchmark
Minhui Zhu, Minyang Tian, Xiaocheng Yang +61
While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, ope…
Optimal information transmission in a sequential model for cell division
Krishna P. Ramachandran, Motasem ElGamel, Farshid Jafarpour +1
In proliferating cell populations, adaptive changes to biochemical reactions can change a cell's division time, which in turn can change the population size. However, biochemical r…
Size-structured populations with growth fluctuations: Feynman--Kac formula and decoupling
Ethan Levien, Yaïr Hein, Farshid Jafarpour
We study a size-structured population model in which individual cells grow at a rate determined by a fluctuating internal variable (e.g., gene expression levels). Many previous mod…
Asymptotic decoupling of population growth rate and cell size distribution
Yaïr Hein, Farshid Jafarpour
The rate at which individual bacterial cells grow depends on the concentrations of cellular components such as ribosomes and proteins. These concentrations continuously fluctuate o…