Inertial spin model of flocking with position-dependent forces

Abstract

We propose an extension to the inertial spin model (ISM) of flocking and swarming. The model has been introduced to explain certain dynamic features of swarming (second sound, a lower than expected dynamic critical exponent) while preserving the mechanism for onset of order provided by the Vicsek model. The inertial spin model (ISM) has only been formulated with an imitation (“ferromagnetic”) interaction between velocities. Here we show how to add position-dependent forces in the model, which allows to consider effects such as cohesion, excluded volume, confinement, and perturbation with external position-dependent field, and thus study this model without periodic boundary conditions. We study numerically a single particle with an harmonic confining field and compare it to a Brownian harmonic oscillator and to a harmonically confined active Browinian particle, finding qualitatively different behavior in the three cases.