Emergent synchronization and flocking in purely repulsive self-navigating particles

Abstract

Inspired by groups of animals and robots, we study the collective dynamics of large numbers of active particles, each one trying to get to its own randomly placed target, while avoiding collisions with each other. The particles we study are repulsive homing active Brownian particles, self-propelled particles whose orientation relaxes at a finite rate towards an absorbing target in two-dimensional continuous space. For a wide range of parameters, these particles form synchronized system-wide chiral flocks, in spite of the absence of explicit alignment interactions. We show that this dramatic behavior obtains for different system sizes and density, that it is robust against the addition of noise, polydispersity, and bounding walls, and that it can exhibit dynamical topological defects. We develop an analogy to an off-lattice, ferromagnetic XY model, which allows us to interpret the different phases, as well as the topological defects.