Boltzmann and hydrodynamic description for self-propelled particles

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2006 Aug;74(2 Pt 1):022101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.74.022101. Epub 2006 Aug 2.

Abstract

We study analytically the emergence of spontaneous collective motion within large bidimensional groups of self-propelled particles with noisy local interactions, a schematic model for assemblies of biological organisms. As a central result, we derive from the individual dynamics the hydrodynamic equations for the density and velocity fields, thus giving a microscopic foundation to the phenomenological equations used in previous approaches. A homogeneous spontaneous motion emerges below a transition line in the noise-density plane. Yet, this state is shown to be unstable against spatial perturbations, suggesting that more complicated structures should eventually appear.