New J. Phys. 10 (February 2008) 023036 (11pp) doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/10/2/023036
Emergence of agent swarm migration and vortex formation through inelastic collisions
D Grossman1, I S Aranson2 and E Ben Jacob1,3,4
1 School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
2 Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 South Cass Avenue, Argonne, IL 60439, USA
3 Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0319, USA
4 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.
E-mail: eshelbj@gmail.comAbstract.
Biologically inspired models of self-propelled interacting agents display a wide variety of collective motion such as swarm migration and vortex formation. In these models, active interactions among agents are typically included such as velocity alignment and cohesive and repulsive forces that represent agents' short- and long-range 'sensing' capabilities of their environment. Here, we show that similar collective behaviors can emerge in a minimal model of isotropic agents solely due to a passive mechanism—inelastic collisions among agents. The model dynamics shows a gradual velocity correlation build-up into the collective motion state. The model displays a discontinuous transition of collective motion with respect to noise and exhibits several collective motion types such as vortex formation, swarm migration and also complex spatio-temporal group motion. This model can be regarded as a hybrid model, connecting granular materials and agent-based models.
Received 24 November 2007
Published 25 February 2008
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