Bond disorder enhances the information transfer in polar flock

TL;DR

This study shows that bond disorder in polar self-propelled particles can improve long-range order and speed up information transfer, especially near the phase transition, revealing new effects of inhomogeneity.

Contribution

It demonstrates how bond disorder changes the nature of phase transitions and enhances ordering and information transfer in polar flock systems.

Findings

Bond disorder converts the phase transition from discontinuous to continuous.

Increased disorder leads to more homogeneous flock states.

Bond disorder accelerates information transfer and increases entropy.

Abstract

Collection of self-propelled particles (SPPs) exhibit coherent motion and show true long-range order in two-dimensions. Inhomogeneity, in general destroys the usual long-range order of the polar SPPs. We model a system of polar self-propelled particles with inhomogeneous interaction strength or bond disorder. The system is studied near the order-to-disorder transition for different strengths of the disorder. The nature of phase transition changes from discontinuous to continuous type by tuning the strength of the disorder. The bond disorder also enhances the ordering near the transition due to the formation of a homogeneous flock state for the large disorder. It leads to faster information transfer in the system and enhances the system information entropy. Our study gives a new understanding of the effect of intrinsic inhomogeneity in the self-propelled particle system.