Javier Cristín
Research interests
My research covers a wide range of phenomena—from magnetic systems to ant colony dynamics and bird flocks—all unified by a common principle: interactions among individual entities can give rise to emergent collective patterns.
Collective organization in biological systems.
Here I study how large groups of organisms—such as birds, fish, and ants—self-organize through simple local interactions, giving rise to complex, coordinated behaviors at the group level. The work explores information propagation in starling flocks, scale-free cascades in fish schools or occupancy patterns in ant colonies. Together, these studies reveal universal principles underlying collective motion, decision-making, and space use in biological groups, with implications for both ecology and active matter physics.
Conservative fluctuations in physical systems
Here I explore how stochastic fluctuations can be introduced into discrete models while exactly preserving key physical quantities, such as momentum or magnetization. The approach relies on coupling noise to local differences or link variables, rather than directly to individual entities, ensuring that global conservation laws are maintained at every step. This framework is applied to diverse systems, from collective motion (flocks and swarms) to spin models and interface growth, offering new tools for simulating conservative dynamics in complex systems. The work provides a bridge between microscopic stochastic rules and macroscopic conservation properties.
