Analysis of aligning active local searchers orbiting around their common home position

TL;DR

This paper investigates how pairwise alignment interactions influence the collective movement of searchers around a central point, revealing a transition from random exploration to collective circular motion, supported by simulations and analytical models.

Contribution

It introduces a combined simulation and analytical approach to understand the transition to collective circular motion in aligned searcher ensembles around a central point.

Findings

Above a critical interaction strength, searchers move in circles around the home.

The analytical model predicts critical parameters and velocity distributions.

The study connects collective motion to phenomena like zooplankton Daphnia behavior.

Abstract

We discuss effects of pairwise aligning interactions in an ensemble of central place foragers or of searchers that are connected to a common home. In a wider sense, we also consider self moving entities that are attracted to a central place such as, for instance, the zooplankton Daphnia being attracted to a beam of light. Single foragers move with constant speed due to some propulsive mechanism. They explore at random loops the space around and return rhytmically to their home. In the ensemble, the direction of the velocity of a searcher is aligned to the motion of its neighbors. At first, we perform simulations of this ensemble and find a cooperative behavior of the entities. Above an over-critical interaction strength the trajectories of the searcher qualitatively changes and searchers start to move along circles around the home position. Thereby, all searchers rotate either clockwise or anticlockwise around the central home position as it was reported for the zooplankton Daphnia. At second, the computational findings are analytically explained by the formulation of transport equations outgoing from the nonlinear mean field Fokker-Planck equation of the considered situation. In the asymptotic stationary limit, we find expressions for the critical interaction strength, the mean radial and orbital velocities of the searchers and their velocity variances. We also obtain the marginal spatial and angular densities in the under-critical regime where the foragers behave like individuals as well as in the over-critical regime where they rotate collectively around the considered home. We additionally elaborate the overdamped Smoluchowski-limit for the ensemble.