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Updated: Aug 9, 2025

Quantifying Bacterial Surface Swarming Motility on Inducer Gradient Plates
Published on: January 5, 2022
Diverse behaviors in non-uniform chiral and non-chiral swarmalators
Steven Ceron1,2, Kevin O'Keeffe3, Kirstin Petersen4
1Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA.
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.
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