The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), the Italian National Research Council, is the coordinator for all public institutions devoted to science and research. It works both as a general funding agency as well as a research network through about one hundred institutes distributed throughout the Italian territory. The Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi (ISC) was created in 2004 in the framework of the reformation undergone by CNR and the unification process with the former INFM (National Institute for the Physics of Condensed Matter). It includes four laboratories located at different sites (three of which are located in the region of Rome and one in Florence). The CNR team represents a collaboration between researchers based at ISC and reasearchers from CNR-INFM. ISC is an interdisciplinary center to study complex systems in physics, chemistry, biology and information theory. It includes 80 scientists working on a wide range of topics including non-linear dynamics, fractals, scaling, critical phenomena, non-equilibrium and glassy systems, complex networks and self-organization. The CNR team participating in the consortium has lead in the past an internationally recognized research activity in the theory and modeling of non-equilibrium complex systems being particularly active in the application of complex systems methodologies and statistical mechanics models to plasticity, fracture, granular matter, magnetic hysteresis and superconductivity. The CNR team brings to the consortium its experience in the modeling of interacting complex systems, non-equilibrium dynamics, self-organized criticality, avalanche phenomena and disordered materials. In addition the team has a working knowledge in the analysis and processing of correlated or clustered data, networks, and noisy signals.

Team Leader: Stefano Zapperi is a researcher at CNR-INFM since 2000. From the end of 2007 he has moved to the CNR-INFM research center S3 in Modena. He is an expert in the statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium complex systems, self-organized criticality and disordered media. His expertise includes theories and numerical modeling of fracture, plasticity, magnetism and superconducting vortices. He is author of more than 80 publications (5 in Nature journals, 20 in Phys. Rev. Lett.) receiving more than 1700 citations. He is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Statistical Mechanics and organized 5 international conferences on applications of complex systems theory to materials science, including a forthcoming ESF exploratory workshop on “Crackling Noise”. In 2004 he received the Marie Curie Excellence award. Detailed CV is available here.

Additional participants

Luciano Pietronero: Born in Rome in 1949, Physicist and Professor of Condensed Matter Theory. Founder and Director of the CNR Institute of Complex Systems, Italy, which involves a total of about 200 researchers from CNR, INFM, INOA and University. Teachings at University of Groningen, The Netherlands, University of Roma ‘La Sapienza’ and Trieste, his vast expertise includes condensed matter theory, high temperature superconductivity, statistical Physics and complexity, including interdisciplinary applications in Astrophysics, Biology, network etc. He is author of more than 300 papers and editor of 5 books. Scientific director of “Applied Financial Science”, NYSE (USA) and organizer of the European Network on: Fractal structures and self-organization (1998-2003) with 11 teams from 8 countries. Chairman of the next Statphys 23 Conference, Genua 2007, the world meeting for statistical Physics which takes place every three years.

Alberto Petri: He started his scientific career working on the design of laser cavities and optoacustics waveguides at the Italian Energy Agency (ENEA) and at the Institute of Acoustics at CNR. After getting his Ph. D. at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ with a thesis on the vibrational properties of fractal lattices, he started to work on different subjects of statistical mechanics, including the dynamic properties of disordered systems, models for the fracture of disordered solids, irreversible and reversible dynamics in lattice models, and the mechanics of granular matter. Since then he regularly visits the Statistical Mechanics group at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) where he maintains profitable and stable collaborations. Now he is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Complex Systems of CNR in Rome, where he started to work also on experiments. Besides investigating time series from acoustic emission and finance, he recently stimulated and coordinated the set up of an experimental facility for the study of the physics of sheared granular matter. Beyond TRIGS he has been investigator in many projects. He also co-ordinated several projects both at national and international level, and organized many workshops and conferences.

Fergal Dalton: CNR-ISC Researcher. He obtained his Bachelor of Science at the Physics Department of Dublin City University in 1995 before pursuing a year-long course in Mathematical Physics at the Theoretical Physics Department of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. Following this, he started his doctoral studies at the Physics Department of the University of Limerick under the supervision of Dr. David Corcoran. The research involved studying extensively the properties of various models exhibiting Self Organised Criticality but, given the dearth of physical verifications of the widely-cited theory, moved rapidly to the design and construction of such an apparatus. The research verified the existence of a “Self-Organised Critical” phase in the device though noted that the critical state emerged only from a certain initial “basin of attraction”. Since moving to Italy in 2002, Dalton has continued to study the effects of shear on a Granular Medium, focussing on the instrinsic properties of the system. Experiments have verified that the solid and fluid phases leave distinct signatures on the torque distribution from the device, and that the system exhibits behaviour consistent with the motion of magnetic domains.

Giorgio Pontuale: CNR-ISC technician.

Valentina Beato: CNR-ISC researcher, at the moment developing of a cellular automaton model for dislocation interactions. She joined the group of Luciano Pietronero the first time in the year 2000 to work on long-range interacting many-boby systems. At that time she met Stefano Zapperi and worked with him tightly to investigate the force distributions of dislocation assemblies. Afterwards she left Italy to join the group of Prof. H. Engel at the Technische Universität in Berlin where she worked on noiseßinduced phenomena in nonßlinear systems and got a PhD in Theoretical Physics. Here she had the possibility to work experimentally on the light-sensitive Belousov-Zahbotinski reaction.

Since May 2006 she joined the group of Luciano Pietronero again. Toghether with Stefano Zapperi she is working on numerical simulation to reproduce size-effects found recently in micron-scale samples.

Rosario Capozza: is a postdoctoral fellow at CNR-INFM, Modena. He is studying frictional instabilities by molecular dynamics simulations.