Abstract
Synchronization, the temporal coordination of coupled oscillators, allows fireflies to flash in unison, neurons to fire collectively and human crowds to fall in step on the London Millenium bridge. Here, we interpret active (or self-propelled) chiral microswimmers with a distribution of intrinsic frequencies as motile oscillators and show that they can synchronize over very large distances, even for local coupling in 2D. This opposes to canonical non-active oscillators on static or time-dependent networks, leading to synchronized domains only. A consequence of this activity-induced synchronization is the emergence of a `mutual flocking phase', where particles of opposite chirality cooperate to form superimposed flocks moving at a relative angle to each other, providing a chiral active matter analogue to the celebrated Toner-Tu phase. The underlying mechanism employs a positive feedback loop involving the two-way coupling between oscillators' phase and self-propulsion, and could be exploited as a design principle for synthetic active materials and chiral self-sorting techniques
Highlights
Populations of motile entities, from bacteria to synthetic microswimmers, can spontaneously self-organize into phases which are unattainable in equilibrium passive matter
A consequence of this activity-induced synchronization is the emergence of a “mutual flocking phase,” where particles of opposite chirality cooperate to form superimposed flocks moving at a relative angle to each other, providing a chiral active matter analogue to the celebrated Toner-Tu phase
Notice that most previous studies on synchronization in dynamic networks have focused on identical oscillators whose phase does not affect their motion in space [53,54,55,56], showing that the absence of global synchronization for Kuramoto oscillators in 2D is generically preserved, even if carried by active particles
Summary
Populations of motile entities, from bacteria to synthetic microswimmers, can spontaneously self-organize into phases which are unattainable in equilibrium passive matter. Notice that most previous studies on synchronization in dynamic networks have focused on identical oscillators whose phase does not affect their motion in space [53,54,55,56], showing that the absence of global synchronization (and other scaling properties) for Kuramoto oscillators in 2D is generically preserved, even if carried by active particles Note that despite this recent boost of activity on synchronization of motile oscillators, the dispersion of natural frequencies, a main feature in synchronization problems, has not been explored in detail. Models considering agents whose phase, or a different internal state, affect the way they move in space appeared recently [70,71,72,73,74] but did not consider particles self-propelling in the direction of their phase (with a distribution of natural frequencies and local coupling), which is the key ingredient of the present model. The synchronization behavior is controlled by Var( ), such that this distribution is largely representative of cases of several species and continuous frequency distributions
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