FLOCKS, SCHOOLS AND SWARMS - EMERGENCE OF ORDER IN SYSTEMS OF INTERACTING SELF-PROPELLED PARTICLES

Pawel ROMANCZUK

Institute of Theoretical Biology, Department of Biology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Collective motion of living organisms such as exhibited by flocks of birds, bacterial colonies or insect swarms is a beautiful self-organization phenomenon in nature, which has fascinated scientists from many different disciplines including physics. Here, the so-called Vicsek model [1] of self-propelled particles (SPP) interacting with alignment interaction became a starting point and a reference model for the field of active matter physics, which emerged over the past 20 years [2,3,4]. In the first part of my talk, I will give first a brief overview over our current understanding of the self-organized emergence of collective motion in these non-equilibrium systems from a statistical physics point of view. In the second part, I will discuss some examples of our recent research on the large-scale dynamics and pattern formation in SPP-models motivated by biological systems, which go beyond minimal alignment models.

[1] Vicsek, T., Czirók, A., Ben-Jacob, E., Cohen, I., & Shochet, O. (1995). Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles. Physical Review Letters, 75(6), 1226.
[2] Ramaswamy, S. (2010). The Mechanics and Statistics of Active Matter. Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 1, 323-345.
[3] Vicsek, T., & Zafeiris, A. (2012). Collective motion. Physics Reports, 517(3), 71-140.
[4] Romanczuk, P., Bär, M., Ebeling, W., Lindner, B., & Schimansky-Geier, L. (2012). Active brownian particles. The European Physical Journal Special Topics, 202(1), 1-162.

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