Diverse Behaviors in Non-Uniform Chiral and Non-Chiral Swarmalators

TL;DR

This paper explores complex behaviors in swarmalators with realistic features like local coupling and chirality, revealing new patterns such as vortex lattices and phase waves relevant to natural and artificial systems.

Contribution

It extends previous models by incorporating local coupling, non-identical frequencies, and chirality, uncovering diverse emergent behaviors in swarmalator systems.

Findings

Discovery of vortex lattice formations

Identification of beating clusters and phase waves

Relevance to natural and artificial micro-scale systems

Abstract

We study the emergent behaviors of a population of swarming coupled oscillators, dubbed 'swarmalators'. Previous work considered the simplest, idealized case: identical swarmalators with global coupling. Here we expand this work by adding more realistic features: local coupling, non-identical natural frequencies, and chirality. This more realistic model generates a variety of new behaviors including lattices of vortices, beating clusters, and interacting phase waves. Similar behaviors are found across natural and artificial micro-scale collective systems, including social slime mold, spermatozoa vortex arrays, and Quincke rollers. Our results indicate a wide range of future use cases, both to aid characterization and understanding of natural swarms, and to design complex interactions in collective systems from soft and active matter to micro-robotics.