Traffic jams, gliders, and bands in the quest for collective motion of self-propelled particles

Abstract

We study a simple swarming model on a two-dimensional lattice where the self-propelled particles exhibit a tendency to align ferromagnetically. Volume exclusion effects are present: particles can only hop to a neighboring node if the node is empty. Here we show that such effects lead to a surprisingly rich variety of self-organized spatial patterns. As particles exhibit an increasingly higher tendency to align to neighbors, they first self-segregate into disordered particle aggregates. Aggregates turn into traffic jams. Traffic jams evolve toward gliders, triangular high density regions that migrate in a well-defined direction. Maximum order is achieved by the formation of elongated high density regions--bands--that transverse the entire system. Numerical evidence suggests that below the percolation density the phase transition associated with orientational order is of first order, while at full occupancy it is of second order.