Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 33: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems I (joint session DY/BP)
DY 33.9: Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 11:45–12:00, ZEU/0114
Minority-triggered reorientation yields macrocscopic cascades and maximal responsiveness in a Vicsek swarm — •Simon Syga1, Chandraniva Guha Ray2,3,4, Josué Manik Nava Sedeño5, Fernando Peruani6, and Andreas Deutsch1 — 1Technische Universität Dresden, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 3Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany — 4Center for Systems Biology Dresden, Germany — 5Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico — 6CY Cergy Paris Université, Paris, France
Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits bursty reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations associated with criticality. This ensures that information, like the presence of predators, quickly spreads through a group, ensuring an adequate response. 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 generates heavy-tailed cascades of reorientations and macroscopic spatial correlations over broad parameter ranges, without fine-tuning. Our mechanism preserves cohesion while markedly enhancing collective responsiveness: localized directional cues elicit amplified, group-level reorientation. Our results provide a parsimonious, biologically interpretable route to critical-like fluctuations and high susceptibility in collective motion.
Keywords: Collective motion; self-organization; scale-free correlations; agent-based model; Vicsek model