I was trained as a theoretical physicist and I have worked mainly in statistical mechanics of disordered systems, with particular emphasis on glassy systems, liquids, and multi-agents models.

More recently, I started working on collective animal behaviour, trying to adopt an interdisciplinary approach that uses methods from statistical physics to solve biological and ethological problems. In this second life of mine, I mainly work on collecting and analyzing empirical data about bird flocking. Being a theoretician, this is fun, and the results are not as bad as one may suppose.

Normally, here I write a few words about my affiliation. The current situation in Italy, though, is so fluid that I am not confident in saying anything too definitive about this issue. I will be a CNR researcher, anyway.

COLLECTIVE ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR:

In the last three years I was the coordinator of the INFM-CNR node of the EC-funded STARFLAG project. The aim of my node was to collect three-dimensional data of free flying starlings in very large flocks and to understand the fundamental rules of interaction among the birds. Once we had the 3D data we finally discovered that the interaction is quite different from what was assumed in most models of collective behaviour. The new interaction we discovered is the key ingredient granting the extraordinary cohesion that we see in nature.

SUPERCOOLED LIQUIDS AND THE GLASS TRANSITION:

I am working on devising new methods to detect a growing static correlation length in deeply supercooled liquids. By using amorphuos boundary conditions we measured for the first time a thermodynamic correlation length. In so doing we test the validity of different theoretical frameworks of the glass transition, namely the Adam-Gibbs theory and the Mosaic (aka Random First Order) theory. In collaboration with my PhD student Chiara Cammarota, we are also trying to measure the surface tension between different amorphous phases in deeply supercooled liquids. My coworkers on this topic are Paolo Verrocchio, Tomas Grigera, Chiara Cammarota, Giacomo Gadrenigo, Giulio Biroli and Jean-Philippe Bouchaud.

Left: we created a spherical excitation in a supercooled liquid and let the particles relax. Light=large displacements, dark=small displacement. Upper panels: high temperature; lower panels: low temperature.

Read more about the growth of amorphous order in glass-forming liquids.

 A BROADER PERSPECTIVE:

I have been working on several other topics in the past, and I still do. Statistical physics is my original field of expertise, and in particular disordered systems and glasses. Check the tags below to get a broader idea of my research and my collaborations trough some selected publications:

• flocking and collective animal behaviour
  
• spin-glasses
• potential energy landscape and saddles
• glass-forming liquids
• elasticity in supercooled liquids
• econophysics, multi-agents models
  
• coarsening

PUBLICATIONS AND CV:

My publications ordered according to the number of citations by Google Scholar

My publications ordered cronologically by the Arxiv

My publications ordered in a CiteULike library

You can find a very brief CV here.

CURRENT POSTDOCS:

Massimiliano Viale, collective animal behaviour, inverse problem (STARFLAG)

CURRENT STUDENTS:

• Chiara Cammarota (PhD): glasses, surface tension in amorphous systems, growth of amorphous order, mosaic theory.
• Raffaele Tavarone (Diploma): collective animal behaviour, inter-individual interaction (STARFLAG)

FORMER STUDENTS:

• Alessio Cimarelli (Diploma): collective animal behaviour: velocity field (STARFLAG)
• Valentino Pompili (Diploma): collective animal behaviour, diffusion properties (STARFLAG)
• Fabio Stefanini - Diploma, STARFLAG (now a PhD student at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH, Zurich)
• Alessandro Attanasi - Diploma and PhD, elastic effects in supercooled liquids, effects of quenched disorder in superconductors (now at NERGAL)
• Andrea Procaccini - PhD, STARFLAG (now a post-doc in the Statistical Physics and Computational Systems Biology group at ISI, Torino)
• Alessia Annibale - Diploma, Spin Glasses (now a Lecturer in the Disordered Systems group at King's College, London)
• Elisa Trevigne - Diploma, Spin Glasses (now at University Tor Vergata, Rome)
• Giulia Gualdi - Diploma, Spin Glasses (now at University of Camerino)

PEDESTRIAN REVIEWS:

Check my pedagogical reviews on spin-glasses and supercooled liquids, the infamous Spin-Glass Theory for Pedestrians
and Supercooled Liquids for Pedestrians.

TEACHING:

I teach a 20hrs course on Disordered Systems for the PhD in Physics at the University `La Sapienza'.

MONGIBELLO:

This is it, the Mongibello.