Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-6-2020
Department 1
Physics
Abstract
Previous work has suggested that disordered swarms of flying insects can be well modeled as self-gravitating systems, as long as the “gravitational” interaction is adaptive. Motivated by this work, we compare the predictions of the classic, mean-field King model for isothermal globular clusters to observations of insect swarms. Detailed numerical simulations of regular and adaptive gravity allow us to expose the features of the swarms' density and velocity profiles that are due to long-range interactions and are captured by the King model phenomenology, and those that are due to adaptivity and short-range repulsion. Our results provide further support for adaptive gravity as a model for swarms.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013271
Version
Version of Record
Recommended Citation
Gorbonos, D., van der Vaart, K., Sinhuber, M., Puckett, J.G., Reynolds, A.M., Ouellette, N.T. and Gov, N.S., (2020). Similarities between insect swarms and isothermal globular clusters. Physical Review Research, 2(1), p.013271.
Required Publisher's Statement
This article was originally made available on the publisher's website.