"The Physics of Flocking," Cristina Marchetti, Syracuse University скачать в хорошем качестве

"The Physics of Flocking," Cristina Marchetti, Syracuse University

Birds flock, bees swarm and fish school. These are just some of the remarkable examples of collective behavior found in nature. Physicists have been able to capture some of this behavior by modeling organisms as tiny arrows that align with their neighbors according to simple rules. Successes like these have spawned a field devoted to the physics of 'active matter,' which studies both living and non-living systems where a large number of individually driven units exhibit coherent organization at larger scales. Such systems include suspensions of swimming bacteria, layers of migrating cells, and collections of synthetic microswimmers. Physicists, biologists, engineers and mathematicians are now engaged in modeling the complex behavior of these systems, and in trying to identify universal principles.