Related papers: A note on Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in flocks …
Speed fluctuations of individual birds in natural flocks are moderate, due to the aerodynamic and biomechanical constraints of flight. Yet the spatial correlations of such fluctuations are scale-free, namely they have a range as wide as the…
From bird flocks to fish schools, animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind. Most studies in collective animal behaviour have aimed to understand how a globally ordered state may emerge from simple…
Flocks of birds exhibit a remarkable degree of coordination and collective response. It is not just that thousands of individuals fly, on average, in the same direction and at the same speed, but that even the fluctuations around the mean…
We present a quantitative continuum theory of ``flocking'': the collective coherent motion of large numbers of self-propelled organisms. Our model predicts the existence of an ``ordered phase'' of flocks, in which all members of the flock…
As the constituents of a flock are polar, one expects a fore-aft asymmetry in their interactions. We show here that the resulting antisymmetric part of the "exchange coupling" between a bird and its neighbours, if large enough, destabilizes…
Recent investigations have provided important insights into the complex structure and dynamics of collectively moving flocks of living organisms. Two intriguing observations are, scale-free correlations in the velocity fluctuations, in the…
Phase transitions not allowed in equilibrium steady states may happen however at the fluctuating level. We observe for the first time this striking and general phenomenon measuring current fluctuations in an isolated diffusive system. While…
One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external perturbation, such as the presence of a…
When animal groups move coherently in the form of a flock, their trajectories are not all parallel, the individuals exchange their position in the group. In this Letter we introduce a measure of this mixing dynamics, which we quantify as…
Many systems in nature, from ferromagnets to flocks of birds, exhibit ordering phenomena on the large scale. In physical systems order is statistically robust for large enough dimensions, with relative fluctuations due to noise vanishing…
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking in systems with symmetry is a cornerstone phenomenon accompanying second-order phase transitions. Here, we predict the opposite phenomenon, namely, spontaneous symmetry emergence in a system that lacks…
The existing consensus is that flocks are poised at criticality, entailing long correlation lengths and a maximal value of Shannon mutual information in the large-system limit. We show, by contrast, that for finite flocks in the long…
Collective motion is abundant in nature, producing a vast amount of phenomena which have been studied in recent years, including the landing of flocks of birds. We investigate the collective decision making scenario where a flock of birds…
The aim of the present paper is to elucidate the transition from collective to random behavior exhibited by various mathematical models of bird flocking. In particular, we compare Vicsek's model [Viscek et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 1226 --…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a phenomenon of an alteration of a state symmetry without a change in the system symmetry. A transition from a state with unbroken symmetry to a state with broken symmetry leads to a qualitative change in…
In arXiv:1911.06042v1 M. Casiulis et al. study a Hamiltonian model in which rigid rotations of moving clusters give rise to scale-free correlations of velocity and speed. M. Casiulis et al. compare correlations in their model to those…
Recent experimental evidence suggests that interactions in flocks of birds do not involve a characteristic length scale. Bird flocks have also been revealed to have an inhomogeneous density distribution, with the density of birds near the…
In recent years it has become evident the need of understanding how failure of coordination imposes constraints on the size of stable groups that highly social mammals can live in. We examine here the forces that keep animals together as a…
Bird flocks are a paradigmatic example of collective motion. One of the prominent experimental traits discovered about flocks is the presence of long range velocity correlations between individuals, which allow them to influence each other…