Numerical models indicate that collective animal behavior may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, ...so that models and theories mostly rely on aprioristic assumptions. By reconstructing the three-dimensional positions of individual birds in airborne flocks of a few thousand members, we show that the interaction does not depend on the metric distance, as most current models and theories assume, but rather on the topological distance. In fact, we discovered that each bird interacts on average with a fixed number of neighbors (six to seven), rather than with all neighbors within a fixed metric distance. We argue that a topological interaction is indispensable to maintain a flock's cohesion against the large density changes caused by external perturbations, typically predation. We support this hypothesis by numerical simulations, showing that a topological interaction grants significantly higher cohesion of the aggregation compared with a standard metric one.
This reprint volume is in honour of one of the leaders of Italian high-energy physics, Antonino Zichichi, who is now 65 years old. It covers the first part of his activity: the years 1959-1976, ...probably the most intense of his scientific career. The volume includes reprints of articles and of some published laboratory reports, documenting the extraordinary constancy of Zichichi in a scientific programme which spanned more than a decade and laid the foundations for the subsequent discovery by M Perl of the heavy lepton, HL (now called τ), first proposed and searched for at CERN and Frascati by Zichichi in the early sixties.
Bird flocking is a striking example of collective animal behaviour. A vivid illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the aerial display of vast flocks of starlings gathering at dusk over the ...roost and swirling with extraordinary spatial coherence. Both the evolutionary justification and the mechanistic laws of flocking are poorly understood, arguably because of a lack of data on large flocks. Here, we report a quantitative study of aerial display. We measured the individual three-dimensional positions in compact flocks of up to 2700 birds. We investigated the main features of the flock as a whole (shape, movement, density and structure) and we discuss these as emergent attributes of the grouping phenomenon. Flocks were relatively thin, of various sizes, but constant proportions. They tended to slide parallel to the ground and, during turns, their orientation changed with respect to the direction of motion. Individual birds kept a minimum distance from each other that was comparable to their wing span. The density within the aggregations was nonhomogeneous, as birds were packed more tightly at the border than the centre of the flock. These results constitute the first set of large-scale data on three-dimensional animal aggregations. Current models and theories of collective animal behaviour can now be tested against these data.
The NA48/2 experiment at CERN collected a large sample of charged kaon decays to final states with multiple charged particles in 2003–2004. A new upper limit on the rate of the lepton number ...violating decay K±→π∓μ±μ± is reported: B(K±→π∓μ±μ±)<8.6×10−11 at 90% CL. Searches for two-body resonances X in K±→πμμ decays (such as heavy neutral leptons N4 and inflatons χ) are also presented. In the absence of signals, upper limits are set on the products of branching fractions B(K±→μ±N4)B(N4→πμ) and B(K±→π±X)B(X→μ+μ−) for ranges of assumed resonance masses and lifetimes. The limits are in the (10−11,10−9) range for resonance lifetimes below 100 ps.
Using a technique that is not subject to first-order SU(3) symmetry breaking effects, we determine the V(us) element of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix from data on semileptonic hyperon decays. ...We obtain V(us)=0.2250(27), where the quoted uncertainty is purely experimental. This value is of similar experimental precision to the one derived from K(l3), but it is higher and thus in better agreement with the unitarity requirement, |V(ud)|(2)+|V(us)|(2)+|V(ub)|(2)=1. An overall fit, including the axial contributions and neglecting SU(3) breaking corrections, yields F+D=1.2670 +/-0.0035 and F-D=-0.341+/-0.016 with chi(2)=2.96/3 degrees of freedom.
A
bstract
A measurement of the form factors of charged kaon semileptonic decays is presented, based on 4.4 × 10
6
K
±
→
π
0
e
±
ν
e
(
K
e
3
±
) and 2.3 × 10
6
K
±
→
π
0
μ
±
ν
μ
(
K
μ
3
±
) decays ...collected in 2004 by the NA48/2 experiment. The results are obtained with improved precision as compared to earlier measurements. The combination of measurements in the
K
e
3
±
and
K
μ
3
±
modes is also presented.
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