Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 43: Active Matter IV (joint session BP/CPP/DY)

DY 43.9: Talk

Friday, March 21, 2025, 12:00–12:15, H44

Cognitive flocks: order-disorder transitions and threat evasion — •Priyanka Iyer¹, Cecilia Soroco², and Gerhard Gompper¹ — ¹Forschungszentrum Jülich — ²University of British Columbia, Canada

Directed self-propulsion is ubiquitous in living organisms. From E.Coli dispersing in biofilms to migrating bird flocks, living organisms are constantly out-of equilibrium. By sensing their environment and adjusting their movement, organisms can exhibit emergent patterns and collective behaviors, such as self-organization in human crowds [1], bird flocks, and fish schools. The Inertial Spin Model (ISM) was introduced to explain the fast and robust propagation of information in bird flocks [2], when only alignment interactions are considered. However, more generally, agents exhibit a variety of interactions like local avoidance, cohesion and threat evasion. We show how such behaviors can be incorporated within the framework of the ISM. It is found that local avoidance introduces emergent noise in the system, triggering an order-disorder transition. Exploring the flock dynamics near this transition reveals a complex interplay between cohesion, alignment, and local avoidance, resulting in diverse behaviors such as pronounced shape and density fluctuations, and diffusive motion of the flock. Lastly, by applying the model to a stationary threat scenario, we analyze flock properties that govern threat information propagation in the flock.

[1] Iyer, P. et al. , Comm. Phys. 7.1 (2024): 379.

[2] Attanasi, A. et al. , Nat. Phys. 10, 691-696, (2014)

Keywords: Active Matter; Flocking; Statistical Physics; Biophysics