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Distortion and destruction of colloidal flocks in disordered environments

Nature Physics volume 13, pages 63–67 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

How do flocks, herds and swarms move through disordered environments? The answer to this question is crucial not only to animal groups in the wild, but also to effectively all applications of collective robotics and active materials composed of synthetic motile units1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14. In stark contrast, aside from rare exceptions15,16,17, our physical understanding of flocking has so far been limited to homogeneous media18,19,20. Here we explain how collective motion survives in geometrical disorder. To do so, we combine experiments and analytical theory to examine motile colloids cruising between randomly positioned microfabricated obstacles. We elucidate how disorder and bending elasticity compete to channel the flow of polar flocks along sparse river networks akin those found beyond plastic depinning in driven condensed matter21. Further increasing the disorder, we demonstrate that collective motion is suppressed in the form of a first-order phase transition generic to all polar active materials.

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Figure 1: Emergence and suppression of collective motion.
Figure 2: Flock morphology.
Figure 3: Flocking through river networks.
Figure 4: Roller–obstacle scattering.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from ANR program MiTra and Institut Universitaire de France. We thank F. Peruani, S. Santucci, M. C. Marchetti and D. Carpentier for valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank G. Fabre for help with the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Lyon, Ens de Lyon, Univ. Claude Bernard, CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique, F-69342 Lyon, France

    Alexandre Morin, Nicolas Desreumaux, Jean-Baptiste Caussin & Denis Bartolo

Authors
  1. Alexandre Morin
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  2. Nicolas Desreumaux
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  3. Jean-Baptiste Caussin
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  4. Denis Bartolo
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Contributions

D.B. conceived the project. N.D., A.M. and D.B. designed the experiments. N.D. and A.M. performed the experiments. J.-B.C. and D.B. performed the theory. N.D., A.M., J.-B.C. and D.B. analysed and discussed results. D.B. and A.M. wrote the paper. N.D. and A.M. have equal contributions.

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Correspondence to Denis Bartolo.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Morin, A., Desreumaux, N., Caussin, JB. et al. Distortion and destruction of colloidal flocks in disordered environments. Nature Phys 13, 63–67 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3903

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