Andreu Arinyo i Prats

Interests

I seek the understanding of our world and how that knowledge will evolve with time. To that endeavour, I pursued studies and research in physics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. To contextualize that formation, I set about travelling the world, exposing myself to different cultural systems. That experience highlighted the precarious state of most world cultures with the exposure to rapid change and shocks in the following decades. To bridge that realization with my previous studies, I shifted to complex systems, with research in dynamical systems and information theory. In parallel, I prepared a project to model and characterize the susceptivity to cultural loss in the context of shocks. This project has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions grant to pursue that research for 3 years.

Research

My research involves a wide variety of topics spanning neurophysics, cosmology, dynamical systems, cultural systems, information theory and the preservation of knowledge. What underlines all this diversity of areas is the pursuit of the creation, evolution, destruction and endurance of information and knowledge over time.

Now I focus on modeling different cultural systems that have experienced shocks, catastrophes, extreme events, perturbations, and stress in general. With this modeling and comparison to empirical cases of destruction and resilience, I aim to characterize the loss of culture under shocks, better informing us what made the current cultural systems survive, or experience loss, and what could be of benefit, or not, in the future when other shocks affect cultural systems. All of this is bounded by the use of simulations and Bayesian statistics, which allows both to approach complex topics and refine the modeling of these to provide useful and functional outcomes. 

Other Activities

In my spare time, I love reading, talking and writing about the state of our present world and how it came to be. Moreover, I like travelling, cycling, cooking, hiking, kayaking, climbing and ever struggling with learning music and languages!

Publications

Andreu Arinyo i Prats. Physics of the intergalactic medium: a study of the power spectrum ot the lyman alpha forest and the metal content of damped lyman alpha systems. Universitat de Barcelona, 2015.

A. Arinyo-i-Prats and D. Zurro. Modelling the use of seagrass as combustible by hunter-gatherers in the atacama costal desert under empirical constrains, 5000-1000 b.c.e. To be submitted to Royal Society open science, 2020.

Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Lluis Mas-Ribas, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Ignasi Pérez- Ràfols, and Pasquier Noterdaeme. A metal-line strength indicator for damped lyman alpha (dla) systems at low signal-to-noise. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 481(3):3921–3934, 2018.

Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Matteo Viel, and Renyue Cen. The non-linear power spectrum of the lyman alpha forest. Journal of Cosmol- ogy and Astroparticle Physics, 2015(12):017, 2015.

Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Pablo Moreno-Spiegelberg, Manuel A Matias, and Damià Gomila. Traveling pulses in type-i excitable media. Physical Review E, 104(5):L052203, 2021.

Michael Blomqvist, David Kirkby, Julian E Bautista, Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Anže Slosar, Andreu Font-Ribera, Daniel Margala,

Donald P Schneider, Jose A Vazquez, et al. Broadband distortion modeling in lyman-α forest bao fitting. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2015(11):034, 2015.

 Khee-Gan Lee, Joseph F Hennawi, Casey Stark, J Xavier Prochaska, Martin White, David J Schlegel, Anna-Christina Eilers, Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Nao Suzuki, Rupert AC Croft, et al. Lyα forest tomography from background galaxies: The first megaparsec-resolution large-scale structure map at z> 2. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 795(1):L12, 2014.

Lluís Mas-Ribas, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols, Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Pasquier Noterdaeme, Patrick Petitjean, Donald P Schneider, Donald G York, and Jian Ge. The mean metal-line absorption spectrum of damped lyα systems in boss. The Astrophysical Journal, 846(1):4, 2017.

Pablo Moreno-Spiegelberg, Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Daniel Ruiz-Reynés, Manuel A Matias, and Damià Gomila. Bifurcation structure of traveling pulses in type-i excitable media. Physical Review E, 106(3):034206, 2022.

Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols, Jordi Miralda-Escudé, Andreu Arinyo-i Prats, Andreu Font-Ribera, and Lluís Mas-Ribas. The cosmological bias factor of damped lyman alpha systems: dependence on metal line strength. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 480(4):4702–4709, 2018.