| Issue |
EPL
Volume 153, Number 6, March 2026
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 67001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Biological and soft matter physics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/ae51bc | |
| Published online | 26 March 2026 | |
Global manoeuvring of confined active particle swarms via emergent threshold-based control(a)
1 Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur, Calisto - 2004 route des Lucioles, 06560 Valbonne, France
2 Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, Institut de Physique de Nice - 17 rue Julien Lauprêtre, 06200 Nice, France
Received: 2 December 2025
Accepted: 13 March 2026
Abstract
This study investigates the use of global control strategies to enhance the directed migration of swarms of interacting self-propelled particles confined in a channel. Uncontrolled dynamics naturally leads to wall accumulation, clogging, and band formation due to the interplay between self-organization, volume exclusion and confinement. This work explores whether a uniform global control, such as a magnetic field acting identically on all particles, can robustly enhance collective transport. Using a discrete Vicsek-like model, it is found that simple global alignment controls emerging from reinforcement learning, efficiently suppress unfavorable configurations and significantly increase the net particle flux along a prescribed channel direction. These results highlight that coarse, system-level observations are sufficient to achieve global manoeuvring by indirectly reshaping self-organized microscopic dynamics, even in regimes with strong fluctuations or partial ordering.
Contribution to the Focus Issue on Complex Flows and Complex Fluids edited by Alessandra S. Lanotte, Massimo Cencini, Luca Biferale and Adriano Barra.
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