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

Pawel Romanczuk(Personal webpage)

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.