Topological similarity of random cell complexes and applications

Although random cell complexes occur throughout the physical sciences, there does not appear to be a standard way to quantify their statistical similarities and differences. The various proposals in the literature are usually motivated by the analysis of particular physical systems and do not necessarily apply to general situations. The central concepts in this paper-the swatch and the cloth-provide a description of the local topology of a cell complex that is general (any physical system that can be represented as a cell complex is admissible) and complete (any statistical question about the local topology can be answered from the cloth). Furthermore, this approach allows a distance to be defined that measures the similarity of the local topology of two cell complexes. The distance is used to identify a steady state of a model grain boundary network, quantify the approach to this steady state, and show that the steady state is independent of the initial conditions. The same distance is then employed to show that the long-term properties in simulations of a specific model of a dislocation network do not depend on the implementation of dislocation intersections.