| Founding Body: | Lazioinnova – Regione Lazio |
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| Total grant: | €150k |
| Principal Investigator: | Andrea Cavagna |
| Other participants: | CNR ISC: Massimo Cencini, Stefania Melillo Sapienza: Fabio Santoni, Fabrizio Piergentili, Tommaso Cardona |
| Project duration: | |
| Website: |
Progetto di Ricerca, finanziato ai sensi della L.R. 13/08… Read the rest
| Founding Body: | ERANET |
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| Total grant: | € 70k |
| Principal Investigator: | Andrea Cavagna |
| Other participants: | |
| Project duration: | 2017-2019 |
| Website: |
Our search for midge swarms has taken us to many of the public parks within Rome including Riserva Naturale Valle dell’Aniene, Villa Paganini, Villa Torlonia, Parco dell’Acquedotto, Villa Ada, Laghetto dell’EUR and Ponte Tazio. Basically any place with an aquatic or semiaquatic habitat (the larval stage requires water for development) is where midges can be found. Our experimental setup is similar to that of the flocking experiment except that our baseline distance shrinks from 25 m down to approximately 5 – 8 m (depending on our distance to the swarm).… Read the rest
| Founding Body: | AirForce Office for Scientific Research – USA |
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| Total grant: | $ 400k |
| Principal Investigator: | Andrea Cavagna |
| Other participants: | |
| Project duration: | 2010-2014 |
| Website: |
Close to the glass transition supercooled liquids display an impressive increase of the relaxation time, without any clear sign of growing thermodynamic order, nor correlation length. This is at variance with physical intuition, which suggests that a large relaxation time is always associated to a large correlation length. Even though dynamical length scales were introduced and measured, nothing similar was thought to be possible for thermodynamic lengths.… Read the rest
Basically all existing models of collective animal behaviour (bird flocks, fish schools, etc) assume that the interaction between different individuals depends on the metric distance, just as in physics. This implies, for example, that two birds 5 meters apart interact more strongly than two birds 10 meters apart.
Models developed by biologists are based on a “behavioural zones” scheme, where each zone is associated to one of the three basic ingredients of all models: short range repulsion, alignment, long range attraction.… Read the rest
Education:
Post-Doc, Theoretical Physics, Physics Dept, Manchester University, UK, 2001 (with Alan Bray and Mike Moore)
Post-Doc, Condensed Matter, Theoretical Physics Dept, Oxford University, UK, 1999 (with David Sherrington)
Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, University of Rome Sapienza, Italy, 1998 (Spin-Glasses – advisor Giorgio Parisi)
M.S. and B.A. in Theoretical Physics, University of Milan and SISSA – Trieste, Italy, 1995 (Conformal Field Theory – advisor Giuseppe Mussardo)
I was trained as a theoretical physicist and I have studied for some years the statistical mechanics of disordered systems, with a particular interest in spin-glasses, structural glasses and supercooled liquids. … Read the rest