Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 52: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems III (joint session BP/DY)
DY 52.8: Talk
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 17:00–17:15, BAR/SCHÖ
Frequency-space trajectory Fisher Information to quantify sensitivity in complex living systems — •Zhiheng Wu1 and Isabella Graf1,2 — 1European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany — 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Living systems sense their environment by stochastically mapping external signals onto internal states. For example, several animals including fruit flies and pit vipers encode small changes in the ambient temperature in terms of changes in the interspike time of neurons. The sensitivity of these measurements can be evaluated by the so-called Fisher information (rate). While living systems constantly adapt to changing environments, calculations of Fisher information have so far mostly focused on static signals and internal states. To evaluate measurement sensitivity in the non-static case, we evaluate the trajectory Fisher information and show that, under common assumptions, it can be expressed as an integral over frequency space involving the power spectral density. This expression provides a tractable way to quantify information in adaptive and complex biological systems and we discuss some interesting applications.
Keywords: Biological information processing; Trajectory Fisher information; Frequency space representation; Sensory systems; Measurement sensitivity