Social Insects

Ants under Panic

Ants, are very well established examples of social insects, they are not very wise at the individual level, but collectively they can be quite smart, at least regarding "survival tasks" such as foraging and nest construction.

We have studied less explored sides of ants behavior, such as the dynamics of a crowd of ants inside a cell with two symmetrical exits when they are in panic. Our experiments and simulations show that, when in panic, ants tend to use more one exit than the other sue to a "follow-the-crowd" rule apparently written in their genes. So, when in panic, ants tend to resemble humans.

Our paper "Symmetry breaking in escaping ants" (full text also here ), was featured by The American Naturalist in December, 2005. Also comented by Discover Magazine.

Ant Nest Dynamics

We are currently carrying experiments with ants, intended to study the dynamics of nest activity. We have deployed sensors to monitor ant activity in the wild. We are now preparing to deploy a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to collect activity and enviroment data. The WSN will permit to scale up the previous measuing system. Described in some of our talks on activity measurements: the one at UIO, Oslo and another one at the Wireless School at ARPL, ICTP.

Our preliminary results suggest that our system might transform the way to study social insects in the wild.

Granular Matter

We study avalanches in laboratory piles of ball bearings (any guess about the choice?). More recently we study the strange phenomena of "revolving rivers" and "uphill solitons" in a mysterious sand from "Santa Teresa" (Pinar del Rio province, western Cuba). These two phenomena were discovered in a serendipitous way, and turned out to be completely new for the granular community.

Superconductivity

We have years of work devoted to the field of Superconductivity. Mainly in transport experiments.