“Dirt” Is No Barrier to Flocking

T he onset of fall brings with it mesmerizing flocks of thousands of birds moving in unison through the evening sky. Similar behavior is seen in systems containing other types of self-propelled particles, such as schooling fish, swimming bacteria, andmotile cancer cells. To date, researchers have mostly modeled systems where the media through which the flocking particles move are free of imperfections, leaving open the question of how disorder or “dirt” might change the collective behavior. Now John Toner from the University of Oregon and colleagues have shown that imperfections in the form of quenched disorder have no impact on the ability of flocking particles to move coherently [1, 2]. The researchers hope that their findings could be applied to understand the behavior of flocking cells inside the human body, which is filled with idealized dirt.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Physics

• Publication date

  2022-10-27

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/physics.15.s146
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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