Convergence in a disk stacking model on the cylinder Christophe Golé, Stéphane Douady To cite this version: Christophe Golé, Stéphane Douady. Convergence in a disk stacking model on the cylinder. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Elsevier, In press. hal-02364444 HAL Id: hal-02364444 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02364444 Submitted on 15 Nov 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Convergence in a disk stacking model on the cylinder Christophe Gole´*and Stephane´ Douady † November 14, 2019 Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Convergence: simulations and results 5 2.1 Informal introduction to the geometric concepts. 5 2.2 Dynamics on the chains of length 3: computer simulations . 8 2.3 Sketch of the proofs involved in the classification . 10 2.4 Convergence in configurations starting with longer chains. 13 3 Dynamical and geometric definitions 14 3.1 Disk stacking process ....................................... 14 S 3.2 as a dynamical system . 16 S 3.3 Chains, fronts and their notches . 17 4 Offspring classification of 2- or 3-notches 22 4.1 More definitions and notation . 22 4.2 Offsprings of 1,1 notches . 23 4.3 Partition of the shape space of 3-chains according to overlaps . 24 4.4 Offsprings of 3-notches . 25 4.5 Offsprings of chains of two short notches . 26 4.6 Pentagon Lemma . 28 5 Parametrization of the space C3 29 6 Dynamics on C3: early iterations 30 6.1 Reduction of C3 by symmetry . 31 6.2 Partition of in regions of rhombus and triangle transitions . 33 K12 6.3 acts as reflection in the right half of ............................ 34 S K12 6.4 The upper half of reflects into the lower half under 3 . 35 K12 S 7 Non periodic dynamics in Regions A and A’ 37 7.1 The pentagon deformation map φ(τ;γ) and its relation to 6: . 43 S 7.2 Partition of Region A into finite and infinite convergence . 46 8 Concluding remarks 49 *Corresponding author. [email protected], Mathematics and Statistics Department, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA - Partially supported by NSF grant # 0540740 †Laboratoire Matiere` et Systemes` Complexes, CNRS, France 1 A Classification of 3-notches: proof of Lemma 4.2. 51 B Parameterization of C3 53 C Proof of Proposition 6.2 55 D Computation of the map (τ0;γ0) = φ(τ;γ) 56 Abstract We study an iterative process modelling growth of phyllotactic patterns, wherein disks are added one by one on the surface of a cylinder, on top of an existing set of disks, as low as possible and without overlap. Numerical simulations show that the steady states of the system are spatially pe- riodic, lattices-like structures called rhombic tilings. We present a rigorous analysis of the dynamics of all configurations starting with closed chains of 3 tangent, non-overlapping disks encircling the cylinder. We show that all these configurations indeed converge to rhombic tilings. Surprisingly, we show that convergence can occur in either finitely or infinitely many iterations. The infinite-time convergence is explained by a conserved quantity. Keywords: Disk packing, phyllotaxis, rhombic tiling, attractor, dynamical system. Declaration of interest: None. Figure 1: a. Digitally unrolled spadix of peace lily (Spathyphyllum), showing a phyllotactic structure obtained by joining the center of each organ to those of its contact neighbors. The two white lines in the picture correspond to the same line on the spadix. The pattern is transitioning from 7 up (blue) and 6 down (red) parastichies, to (6, 6). This can be monitored locally via the zigzagging fronts: each pentagon decreases a parastichy number by 1, each triangle increases one by 1. This pattern appears to converge in finite time to a rhombic tiling, where no triangles or pentagon appears any more. Note that this is not a Fibonacci pattern but what we called Quasi-Symmetric in [12]. b. A similar pattern, starting as (6,6) and ending as (6, 6), simulated, with more complicated transitions, by stacking 150 disks over the original bottom (6, 6) front. This pattern ends up, after a last pentagon, back in a (6, 6) rhombic tiling, with fronts repeating with periodicity vector shown by the black dashed arrow. c. The graph showing the fronts parastichy numbers and their convergence to (6, 6). 2 1 Introduction The study of packing of identical elements on the surface of a cylinder originated almost two hundred years ago in phyllotaxis, where packing processes model the morphogenesis of arrangements of plant organs around the stem. The most commonly described arrangements are cylindrical lattices made of two intersecting families of helical rows of elements (called parastichies). The numbers of rows in these families are most often successive Fibonacci numbers [3, 10, 11, 16, 22, 27, 33]. More recently, the lattice arrangements introduced in phyllotaxis have seen applications beyond plant biology. Levitov [17] showed that, theoretically, repulsive vortexes in a type II superconductor lead to minimal energy lattices with Fibonacci phyllotaxis. The spirals of phyllotaxis were reproduced in an experiment using repulsive drops of ferrofluid [37] or with “magnetic cactii” [4]. Regular arrangements that do not necessarily follow the Fibonacci sequence have been studied by Erikson [9], who pointed out examples in microbiology. Carbon nanotubes are non-biological examples of regular tubular lattices [24]. Models of sphere packing have been used for these structures [1, 21], although again they were introduced in 1872 to give an evolutionary explanation to phyllotaxis [13]. In most of the literature cited above, the structures of reference are cylindrical lattices. They appear either as descriptive models [16], minimum of a certain energy [17], minimum of packing density [10], or as stable fixed points of a dynamical system with more or less “soft” interactions between stacked elements [18, 23, 30]. Interesting exceptions to this focus on lattices occur, among others, in [5] where transitions between lattices due to physical deformation of the cylinder are studied in terms of disloca- tions. Line slip structures, where a part of a cylindrical lattice is translated along a parastichy, appear in the densest packings of spheres for certain parameter values [21]. Structures with line slips, do oc- cur in our setting (see Figure 28) but are just examples of a larger set of lattice-like structures, called rhombic tilings [22, 28], which are central to the present paper. When the vertices of a cylindrical lattice are ordered by height, the angle between a vertex and the next one - the angle of divergence in phyl- lotaxis - is constant and close to the Golden Angle ( 137:51o) in Fibonacci phyllotaxis [16, 23, 27]. On ≈ the other hand, in rhombic tilings the divergence angle, as well as the vertical displacement, are peri- odic, but usually not constant. Some data suggests that these patterns may better describe phyllotactic structures [22, 28]. In 1868, Schwendener [33] introduced the first dynamical model of phyllotaxis morphogenesis. It is based on Hofmeister’s observation that a plant organ forms at the edge of the meristem (microscopic tip of a plant stem) at a place where the existing organs have left enough space [34]. Schwendener modeled nascent organs as disks, placed iteratively on the surface of a cylinder, on top of an existing set of disks, as low as possible and without overlap. (Note that the threshold condition subsumed in the expression “enough space” is translated to the geometric condition of “as low as possible”.) While this model produces, as steady states, the cylindrical lattice structures described in the classical phyllotaxis literature, it also exhibits the aforementioned rhombic tilings, which are periodic steady states that look like crooked cylindrical lattices (see Figures 1c and 2. For more on rhombic tilings, see [22, 28]). We conjecture that a subset of the rhombic tilings forms the attractor for this model. In other words, the stacking model always converges toward periodic rhombic tilings, a surprising fact given the appar- ent geometric rigidity of the model. As a first, significant step, we prove here this conjecture for patterns whose initial conditions consists of chains of 3 tangent disks: any configuration produced by the system on such chains converges to some rhombic tiling. We achieve this by providing a complete analysis of the dynamics of the system with these initial conditions. We also show, by examples and numerical simulations that the same geometric mechanism that yields convergence in our simple case also occurs in patterns with more complicated initial conditions. Striking to us was the fact that the disk stacking model exhibits two kinds of convergence to rhombic tilings: the patterns may be pre-periodic and become rhombic tilings in finite time, or they can do so asymptotically, in infinite time. Our rigorous dynamical analysis on the set of 3-chains shows that this is indeed the case even with 3 simple initial conditions. And it unveils a mechanisms of convergence that seems to apply to the general case. Connecting the centers of the tangent disks in a configuration, one obtains a graph (the ontogenetic graph, see [32] and Figure 2). The process of convergence on the space of 3-chains always involve recurring pairs of pentagons and triangles in the faces of the graph (see Figures 1b and 2B).