INT Special Seminar: "Novel Critical Behavior: The Statistical Mechanics of Bird Swarms"

In the past twenty years, a new field of statistical physics has emerged, the study of the
self-organized behavior of animal swarms. It was started in 1995 by a seminal paper of
T. Vicsek and collaborators in Budapest and has since then been considerably extended.
In 2008, extensive empirical data on starling flocks were provided by the STARFLAG
project, carried out at the University of Rome, with G. Parisi as coordinator. These data
were well accounted for by extended versions of the Vicsek model, which is based on a
generalized spin system, with local nearest neighbor interactions leading to spontaneous
symmetry breaking and collective global behavior.