Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 198701 (2009) [4 pages]Energy Landscape of Social BalanceReceived 15 June 2009; published 4 November 2009 We model a close-knit community of friends and enemies as a fully connected network with positive and negative signs on its edges. Theories from social psychology suggest that certain sign patterns are more stable than others. This notion of social “balance” allows us to define an energy landscape for such networks. Its structure is complex: numerical experiments reveal a landscape dimpled with local minima of widely varying energy levels. We derive rigorous bounds on the energies of these local minima and prove that they have a modular structure that can be used to classify them. © 2009 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.198701
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.198701
PACS:
89.65.−s, 89.75.Hc
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