Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 24: Focus Session: Broken Symmetries in Statistical Physics - Dynamics of Odd Systems

DY 24.3: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 19. März 2025, 15:45–16:00, H43

A model collective system made of spinning micro-disks: from fundamentals to microrobot swarms — •Gaurav Gardi — Max Planck Institute fort Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany

Collective systems such as bird flocks and fish schools in nature and colloidal and robotic artificial collectives, display order in their spatiotemporal patterns. Although they are inherently out-of-equilibrium systems, the order in their patterns may share similarities with well-understood phases of matter in equilibrium and thus may be characterized by similar metrics. These phases also contain information, which is embedded in their spatiotemporal structures and can be quantified by information entropy. Although order and information are connected fundamentally in thermodynamics, their relation in collective systems is seldom explored. Here we combine the approaches of statistical mechanics and information sciences to demonstrate the order and the information in the phases of a two-dimensional (2D) small-scale robotic collective system consisting of hundreds of spinning micro-disks at the air-water interface. We design and control the balances of local interaction forces between micro-disks so that distinct globally ordered phases emerge. We relate the order and information in the global phases using concepts from statistical physics and information theory. Lastly, we design experiments to demonstrate the diverse self-organised behaviours of our system and its ability to transition to non-reciprocal regime. Overall, this talk highlights our system's capability to act as an adaptable and versatile model system for dynamic self-organisation and for development of versatile microrobot collectives.

Keywords: Magnetic microdisks; spinning disks; Torque-driven collectives; microrobot collectives; Dynamic self-organisation