Complex networks

Abstract

This article deals with complex networks, and in particular small world and scale free networks. Various networks exhibit the small world phenomenon, including social networks and gene expression networks. The local ordering property of small world networks is typically associated with regular networks such as a 2D square lattice. The small world phenomenon can be observed in most scale free networks, but few small world networks are scale free. The article first provides a brief background on small world networks and two models of scale free graphs before describing the replica method and how it can be applied to calculate the spectral densities of the adjacency matrix and Laplacian matrix of a scale free network. It then shows how the effective medium approximation can be used to treat networks with finite mean degree and concludes with a discussion of the local properties of random matrices associated with complex networks.