Bernt Wennberg: Anticipation in Collective Motion

Many animals, including humans, have predictive capabilities and, presumably, base their behavioral decisions - at least partially - upon an anticipated state of their environment. We explore a minimal version of this idea in the context of particles that interact according to a pairwise potential. Analysis of the system shows that anticipation induces energy dissipation and we show that the kinetic energy asymptotically decays as 1/t. Furthermore, we show that the angular momentum is not necessarily conserved for 𝜏 > 0, and that asymmetries in the initial condition therefore can cause rotational movement.
The talk is based on joint work with P. Gerlee, K. Tunstrøm, and T. Lundh.