|
| | | | |
| | | |
| Stat |
Members: 3645
Articles: 2'501'711
Articles rated: 2609
20 April 2024 |
|
| | | | |
|
Article overview
| |
|
|
Flocks, herds, and schools: A quantitative theory of flocking | | John Toner
; Yuhai Tu
; | | Date: |
16 Apr 1998 | | Subject: | Statistical Mechanics; Soft Condensed Matter | cond-mat.stat-mech cond-mat.soft | | Abstract: | 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 move together with the same mean velocity. This coherent motion of the flock is an example of spontaneously broken symmetry. The ``Goldstone modes’’ associated with this ``spontaneously broken rotational symmetry’’ are fluctuations in the direction of motion of a large part of the flock away from the mean direction. These ``Goldstone modes’’ mix with modes associated with conservation of bird number to produce propagating sound modes. These sound modes lead to enormous fluctuations of the density of the flock. Our model is similar in many ways to the Navier-Stokes equations for a simple compressible fluid; in other ways, it resembles a relaxational time dependent Ginsburg-Landau theory for an $n = d$ component isotropic ferromagnet. In spatial dimensions $d > 4$, the long distance behavior is correctly described by a linearized theory. For $d < 4$, non-linear fluctuation effects radically alter the long distance behavior, making it different from that of any known equilibrium model. In particular, we find that in $d = 2$, where we can calculate the scaling exponents underline{exactly}, flocks exhibit a true, long-range ordered, spontaneously broken symmetry state, in contrast to equilibrium systems, which cannot spontaneously break a continuous symmetry in $d = 2$ (the ``Mermin-Wagner’’ theorem). We make detailed predictions for various correlation functions that could be measured either in simulations, or by quantitative imaging of real flocks. | | Source: | arXiv, cond-mat/9804180 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
|
|
No review found.
Did you like this article?
Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.
browser Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
|
| |
|
|
|
|
News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:
| |
REGISTER