Phase transition and diffusion among socially interacting self-propelled   agents
  We consider a hydrodynamic model of swarming behavior derived from the kinetic description of a particle system combining a noisy Cucker-Smale consensus force and self-propulsion. In the large self-propulsion force limit, we provide evidence of a phase transition from disordered to ordered motion which manifests itself as a change of type of the limit model (from hyperbolic to diffusive) at the crossing of a critical noise intensity. In the hyperbolic regime, the resulting model, referred to as the `Self-Organized Hydrodynamics (SOH)', consists of a system of compressible Euler equations with a speed constraint. We show that the range of SOH models obtained by this limit is restricted. To waive this restriction, we compute the Navier-Stokes diffusive corrections to the hydrodynamic model. Adding these diffusive corrections, the limit of a large propulsion force yields unrestricted SOH models and offers an alternative to the derivation of the SOH using kinetic models with speed constraints. 
Alethea B.T. Barbaro and Pierre Degond
math.AP math-ph math.MP