Dresden 2020 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 54: Poster: Active Matter and Microswimmers (joint session DY/TT)
DY 54.8: Poster
Thursday, March 19, 2020, 15:00–18:00, P1A
Random Caustics in active random walks in random environments — •King Hang Mok1,2 and Ragnar Fleischmann1 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation, Göttingen, Germany — 2Institut für Dynamik komplexer Systeme, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
The trail patterns of Argentine ants can show striking resemblance to the branched flow patterns of waves in correlated random environments. Branched flow is a general phenomenon that is widely observable in nature, such as in the electron flow in semiconductors, tsunami waves in the ocean or the propagation of light and sound through turbulent media. An important mechanism in branched flows is the formation of random caustics, singularities in the ray density corresponding to the wave flow.
We study the density fluctuations of active random walks biased by correlated random environments, resembling the motion of Argentine ants in Gaussian random fields of pheromones. We analyse in which parameter regimes reminiscences of the caustics of the deterministic dynamics in quenched disorder can be observed in the random walk.