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DTSTAMP:20260921T205501Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160316T155503Z
DTSTART:20160321T190000Z
DTEND:20160321T200000Z
UID:event1578@bu.edu
URL:http://physics.bu.edu/internal/events/show/1578
SUMMARY:Statistical Physics of Collective Load Transport by Ants
DESCRIPTION:Featuring Itai Pinkoviezki\n\nPart of the Biophysics/Condensed 
	Matter Seminar Series.\n\nCollectively carrying a heavy load is a hard task
	 and in fact is rarely seen outside ants and humans. Conflicts within the g
	roup must be suppressed to succeed with efficient collective transport. How
	ever\, conformism may render the system unresponsive to new information. Co
	llective transport by ants is therefore an ideal model system to study how 
	animal groups optimize their opposing requirements. We combine experiments 
	and theory to characterize the collective transport. The ants are modeled a
	s binary Ising spins\, representing the two roles ants can perform during t
	ransport. It turns out that the ants poise themselves collectively near a c
	ritical point where the response to a newly attached ant is maximized. We i
	dentify the size as being proportional to an inverse effective temperature 
	and thus the system can exhibit a mesoscopic transition between order and d
	isorder by manipulating the size. Constraining the cargo with a string make
	s the system behave as a strongly non-linear pendulum. Theoretically we pre
	dict that a Hopf bifurcation occurs at a critical size followed by a global
	 bifurcation where full swings emerge. Remarkably\, these theoretical predi
	ctions were verified experimentally.
LOCATION:SCI 328\, 590 Commonwealth Avenue\, 02215
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CLASS:PUBLIC
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