Flocking birds and schools of fish are a familiar sight. While previous research has uncovered the broad dynamics driving these movements, their underlying intricacies remain a mystery. Now a study by a team of New York University mathematicians offers new insights into these phenomena. It reveals that flocks and schools behave in ways similar to a soft crystalline material, with individual birds and fish serving as “atoms” that are evenly spaced in a lattice-like formation.

By harnessing the unique properties of quantum mechanics, scientists and engineers worldwide seek to enable systems with extraordinary capabilities. Many of them are working on the highly anticipated development of quantum computers capable of completing complex calculations at unprecedented speeds. These computers could meet the growing computational demands of both scientific research and data-intensive industries like finance, cybersecurity, and medicine.

Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) usually capture what happens when atomic nuclei smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. But even when the nuclei don’t collide, interesting things can happen. In a new paper just published in Physical Review Letters, members of RHIC’s STAR collaboration describe a new way to use near-miss collisions at RHIC to study what’s going on inside the nucleus. The approach advances the reach of RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, into the next frontier in nuclear physics—a journey into the inner workings of the building blocks of matter.