Posts
PROCEEDS
Probing Complex Dynamical Structures in Three Dimensions
| Founding Body: | European Research Council – ERC Proof of Concept |
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| Total grant: | € 150k |
| Principal Investigator: | Irene Giardina |
| Other participants: | |
| Project duration: | 2016-2018 |
| Website: |
COBBS – Non-biting Midge Experiment
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
ARTSWARM
From self-organized animal groups to distributed artificial swarms: exporting natural behavioural rules to mobile robotics
| Founding Body: | Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Seed Project 2009 |
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| Total grant: | € 650k |
| Principal Investigator: | Irene Giardina |
| Other participants: | |
| Project duration: | 2010-2013 |
| Website: |
SWARM
Empirical analysis and theoretical modelling of self-organized collective behaviour in three-dimensions: from insect swarms and bird flocks to new schemes of distributed coordination
| Founding Body: | European Research Council – ERC Starting Grant 2010 |
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| Total grant: | € 1100k |
| Principal Investigator: | Irene Giardina |
| Other participants: | |
| Project duration: | 2010-2015 |
| Website: |
Metastable states and supersymmetry
Both the static and the dynamical behaviour occurring in mean field spin glass models models can be interpreted as consequences of the complex (free) energy landscape that spin glasses have, with many minima, valleys and saddles. Traditionally, much attention has been devoted in the past to the analysis of absolute minima, i.e. equilibrium states. More recently, we have understood that also metastable states, i.e.… Read the rest
Field theory for finite dimensional spin glasses
Many features predicted by mean field spin glass models, such as the behaviour of susceptibilities and correlation functions or the occurrence of aging and off-equilibrium dynamics, are qualitatively observed in experiments, suggesting that the mean field scenario may hold for finite dimensional systems also. To investigate this hypothesis a field theory for the fluctuations around the mean field solution has been developed.… Read the rest
Spin Glasses: a brief introduction
Spin Glasses are dilute magnetic alloys where the interactions between spins are randomly ferromagnetic or anti-ferromagnetic, and are considered as paradigmatic examples of frozen disorder. The presence of disorder (the random interactions) induces frustration and a greater difficulty for the system to find optimal configurations. As a consequence, these systems exhibit non trivial thermodynamic and dynamic properties, different and richer than those observed in their non disordered counterpart.… Read the rest
What is Econophysics?
Collective phenomena in economics, social sciences and ecology are very attractive for statistical physicists, especially in view of the empirical abundance of non-trivial fluctuation patterns and statistical regularities — think of returns in financial markets or of allometric scaling in ecosystems — which pose intriguing theoretical challenges. On an abstract level, the problems at stake are indeed not too different from, say, understanding how spontaneous magnetization may arise in a magnetic system, since what one wants in both cases is to understand how the effects of interactions at the microscopic scale can build up to the macroscopic scale.… Read the rest