Minority-Triggered Reorientations Yield Macroscopic Cascades and Enhanced Responsiveness in Swarms
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866918381772341248 |
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| author | Syga, Simon Ray, Chandraniva Guha Nava-Sedeño, Josué Manik Peruani, Fernando Deutsch, Andreas |
| author_facet | Syga, Simon Ray, Chandraniva Guha Nava-Sedeño, Josué Manik Peruani, Fernando Deutsch, Andreas |
| contents | Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits rapid reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations. This allows information to spread rapidly through the group, allowing an adequate collective response to environmental changes and threats such as predators. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a simple, biologically plausible mechanism: a minority-triggered reorientation rule. When local order is high, agents sometimes follow a strongly deviating neighbor instead of the majority. This rule qualitatively changes the macroscopic system behavior compared to traditional flocking models, as it generates heavy-tailed cascades of reorientations over broad parameter ranges. Our mechanism preserves cohesion while markedly enhancing collective responsiveness because localized directional cues elicit amplified group-level reorientation. Our results provide a parsimonious, biologically interpretable route to critical-like fluctuations and high responsiveness during flocking. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07254 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Minority-Triggered Reorientations Yield Macroscopic Cascades and Enhanced Responsiveness in Swarms Syga, Simon Ray, Chandraniva Guha Nava-Sedeño, Josué Manik Peruani, Fernando Deutsch, Andreas Quantitative Methods Statistical Mechanics Biological Physics Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits rapid reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations. This allows information to spread rapidly through the group, allowing an adequate collective response to environmental changes and threats such as predators. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce a simple, biologically plausible mechanism: a minority-triggered reorientation rule. When local order is high, agents sometimes follow a strongly deviating neighbor instead of the majority. This rule qualitatively changes the macroscopic system behavior compared to traditional flocking models, as it generates heavy-tailed cascades of reorientations over broad parameter ranges. Our mechanism preserves cohesion while markedly enhancing collective responsiveness because localized directional cues elicit amplified group-level reorientation. Our results provide a parsimonious, biologically interpretable route to critical-like fluctuations and high responsiveness during flocking. |
| title | Minority-Triggered Reorientations Yield Macroscopic Cascades and Enhanced Responsiveness in Swarms |
| topic | Quantitative Methods Statistical Mechanics Biological Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07254 |