Meet The Swirlon – A New State of Active Matter Discovered By Physicists

8. Modeling of Self-Propelled Particles

Modeling was first introduced in 1995 by Tamas Vicsek. He used self-propelled particles and used them as point particles, determining the average direction of motion.

The simulations that he tested demonstrated that these particles moved towards their nearest neighboring particles and swamped together, all moving in the same direction.

So, even though there is no centralized coordination, and the neighbors for these particles change over time, these particles still are modeled. There are four different systems that occur in self-propelled particle modeling.