Life update! Starting in September 2026, I will be starting my ✨own group✨ at the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP) in 🇰🇷South Korea🇰🇷! Which means that I am looking for postdocs in the fields of statistical physics and/or complex dynamical systems! www.apctp.org/bbs/board.ph...

Today on arxiv, a blast from the past: Hamiltonian flocks! Some years ago we showed that this conservative model could support collective motion. In this preprint, I discuss how to properly couple the model to a bath and the effects of time-reversal symmetry in it! arxiv.org/abs/2604.02914

It is an honor and a pleasure to be spontaneously featured in Optica's official outreach platform! Many inspiring papers published in Optica's journals were read in the making of this work, so it feels like a nice loop 😄 www.optica-opn.org/home/newsroo...

New preprint! So, say you're studying some critical transition. How do you catch its universality? Pair correlations? Boring! We threw line segments at the system, looked at intersections with clusters, and uncovered static and dynamical universal behavior of MIPS! arxiv.org/abs/2511.09444

New paper just out, as an editor's suggestion in PRL! While looking for the ideal isotropic bandgap material, we actually discovered new structures. These structures lie at the border between order and disorder, and that's good for optics! More about their structure here, tinyurl.com/3aej53ht ⚛️🧪

Well, not everyone can get a vote of confidence -- but this paper did! New PNAS, 🔥🔥🔥 hot from the press 🔥🔥🔥 And it is an opportunity to thank my collaborators on this project, special shout-out to Eden+Matan for the experiments on robots that motivated this! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text

We need to see science as a social compact where it serves the larger world, not our own interests. As a first step, scientists must communicate to the larger world much better. I wrote an essay about this in 2016, which still holds today. globalecoguy.org/science-comm...

Ok, last update: how to make isotropic bandgaps? At low index contrast, the answer is aperiodic structures, e.g. quasicrystals. We propose that the best material would have a structure factor as close as possible to being just one ring of high values: enter gyromorphs. arxiv.org/abs/2410.09023

Next up: for a change of scenery, let's look at energy landscapes! We showed that numerical commonly used to study the location, energy, and entropic bias of minima in jammed soft spheres completely destroy the geometry of the landscape, and provide an alternative. arxiv.org/abs/2409.121...

Ok let's keep going with updates! This time no point patterns, only robots 🤖 We show that it really matters how their mass is distributed to know how they behave as a collective... Depending on whether they have a heavy head or a heavy back, robots flock or cluster! arxiv.org/html/2409.04...

Oh and actually, I almost forgot, I will be in Paris this December to talk about spectrally-shaped point patterns, FReSCo, and hyperuniformity at the Hyperuniformity workshop organized by Inria! hyperuniformity.sciencesconf.org

Ok so it's been an eventful couple of months or so for me! Let's recap a bit. First, our work on spectral optimization of point patterns is actually out as an Editor's Suggestion in PRE! If you care about correlated disorder, this is probably a good read! journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Hey everyone! I decided I would come back on social media a bit more in the near future, partly because I am now on the ✨Job Market✨ Since I had left the bad place for good already I took the time to re-follow a lot of you. I hope we can rebuild a vibrant interdisciplinary academic community here!

Hey, ever wanted to make point patterns or particle packings but with that one specific kind of correlation you care about? Worry not, FReSCo is now officially out there on GitHub! github.com/martiniani-l...

Is that... a paper update? 👀 After months of extra work, our FReSCo framework to embed arbitrary spectral properties into point patterns has greatly expanded! Threads aren't a thing here so I'll be short: dynamics of points go CHOO CHOO in Fourier space! 🚂 shorturl.at/fjkn6 arxiv.org/abs/2305.15693

Very nice illustration and proof that high-dimensional basins of attraction are shaped like urchins today on the cover of PRL! journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... Nice throwback to our perspective on how to compute their volumes too! More on that soon™️ 👀 www.papersinphysics.org/papersinphys...

A last look at the Alps after a fantastic two weeks at Les Houches -- with a nice Kelvin-Helmholtz instability waving goodbye 🌊 Kudos to the organizers, it's been a fantastic two weeks!

After a few years away from both Europe and optics, what better way to reconnect than going to Les Houches? 😄🏔️ And yes, spoiler alert, photonics is coming back to my research very soon 👀

If astronomers truly believe “the night sky belongs to everyone,” we should honor that ideal when naming objects in the cosmos. Our job is to tell the Universe's story, and as with all stories, the way we tell it matters, Mia de los Reyes @amherstcollege.bsky.social. physics.aps.org/articles/v16...

You may know that 2d solids are almost a field of their own... But it gets even crazier with activity! Find out how activity shatters equilibrium bounds in a great piece of work now out in PRL - or in my first commentary in Physics Magazine 🤗 physics.aps.org/articles/v16...

Hello world! You may know me from The Bad Place, I will likely move my main research and Scicomm updates here, I'm excited to see how this platform will evolve 😄