Spatial flocking: Control by speed, distance, noise and delay

Fish, birds, insects and robots frequently swim or fly in groups. During their 3 dimensional collective motion, these agents do not stop, they avoid collisions by strong short-range repulsion, and achieve group cohesion by weak long-range attraction. In a minimal model that is isotropic, and continuous in both space and time, we demonstrate that (i) adjusting speed to a preferred value, combined with (ii) radial repulsion and an (iii) effective long-range attraction are sufficient for the stable ordering of autonomously moving agents in space. Our results imply that beyond these three rules ordering in space requires no further rules, for example, explicit velocity alignment, anisotropy of the interactions or the frequent reversal of the direction of motion, friction, elastic interactions, sticky surfaces, a viscous medium, or vertical separation that prefers interactions within horizontal layers. Noise and delays are inherent to the communication and decisions of all moving agents. Thus, next we investigate their effects on ordering in the model. First, we find that the amount of noise necessary for preventing the ordering of agents is not sufficient for destroying order. In other words, for realistic noise amplitudes the transition between order and disorder is rapid. Second, we demonstrate that ordering is more sensitive to displacements caused by delayed interactions than to uncorrelated noise (random errors). Third, we find that with changing interaction delays the ordered state disappears at roughly the same rate, whereas it emerges with different rates. In summary, we find that the model discussed here is simple enough to allow a fair understanding of the modeled phenomena, yet sufficiently detailed for the description and management of large flocks with noisy and delayed interactions. Our code is available at http://github.com/fij/flocComment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Hubbard model description of silicon spin qubits: charge stability diagram and tunnel coupling in Si double quantum dots

We apply the recently introduced Hubbard model approach to quantitatively describe the experimental charge stability diagram and tunnel coupling of silicon double quantum dot systems. The results calculated from both the generalized Hubbard model and the microscopic theory are compared with existing experimental data, and excellent agreement between theory and experiment is found. The central approximation of our theory is a reduction of the full multi-electron multi-band system to an effective two-electron model, which is numerically tractable. In the microscopic theory we utilize the Hund-Mulliken approximation to the electron wave functions and compare the results calculated with two different forms of confinement potentials (biquadratic and Gaussian). We discuss the implications of our work for future studies.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure