Collective behaviour of active matter : transition between states and cone of vision effects -

Abstract

Examples of collective behavior are everywhere around us, from birds flocking, fish schooling, fireflies synchronizing, ants colonizing, crowds flowing, to individuals self-organizing into neighborhoods in cities. How does this all come about? Are these forms of collective behavior governed by unifying principles, and can one apprehend them through mathematical models, with insights, physical? I exhibit serious attempts at dealing with such similar questions, the way a physicist, armed with computational resources would. Working with agent-based models, I studied two-dimensional swarms, explored emergent self-organized states at low energies, their stability, their basins of attraction and the transitions between them. My experiments identify key ingredients for any future first principles theory of such behavior. Then, I shift settings and take a deep look at leader-follower dynamics, with cone-of-vision type coupling. My work is motivated by studies of shoals of fish in tanks. But rather than focusing on leadership behavior (which is fashionable in this field), I identify leader-avoiding states, which have as much to say about conditions of effective leadership, as they do about robots in formation, and-or paradoxical regimes of human behavior in confinement.