Erin McCarthy '23, physics summa cum laude, is a rarity among young scientists. As an undergraduate researcher in Syracuse University's College of Arts & Sciences' Department of Physics, she guided a study that appeared in March 2024 in Physical Review Letters. It is the most-cited physics letters journal and the eighth-most cited journal in science overall.
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Credit: Raj Kumar Manna
PITTSBURGH (March 16, 2021) . During the swarming of birds or fish, each entity coordinates its location relative to the others, so that the swarm moves as one larger, coherent unit. Fireflies on the other hand coordinate their temporal behavior: within a group, they eventually all flash on and off at the same time and thus act as synchronized oscillators.
Few entities, however, coordinate both their spatial movements and inherent time clocks; the limited examples are termed swarmalators 1, which simultaneously swarm in space and oscillate in time. Japanese tree frogs are exemplar swarmalators: each frog changes both its location and rate of croaking relative to all the other frogs in a group.