Gregarious versus individualistic behavior in Vicsek swarms and the onset of first-order phase transitions

The standard Vicsek model (SVM) is a minimal non-equilibrium model of self-propelled particles that appears to capture the essential ingredients of critical flocking phenomena. In the SVM, particles tend to align with each other and form ordered flocks of collective motion; however, perturbations co...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Baglietto, Gabriel, Albano, Ezequiel Vicente, Candia, Julián Marcelo
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:Argentina
Institución:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/23534
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/23534
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Self-propelled particles
Vicsek mode
Flocking
Swarming
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Descripción
Sumario:The standard Vicsek model (SVM) is a minimal non-equilibrium model of self-propelled particles that appears to capture the essential ingredients of critical flocking phenomena. In the SVM, particles tend to align with each other and form ordered flocks of collective motion; however, perturbations controlled by a noise term lead to a noisedriven continuous order–disorder phase transition. In this work, we extend the SVM by introducing a parameter α that allows particles to be individualistic instead of gregarious, i.e. to choose a direction of motion independently of their neighbors. By focusing on the small-noise regime, we show that a relatively small probability of individualistic motion (around 10%) is sufficient to drive the system from a Vicsek-like ordered phase to a disordered phase. Despite the fact that the α-extended model preserves the O(n) symmetry and the interaction range, as well as the dimensionality of the underlying SVM, this novel phase transition is found to be discontinuous (first order), an intriguing manifestation of the richness of the non-equilibrium flocking/swarming phenomenon.