Trafficlike collective movement of ants on trails: absence of jammed phase

John, Alexander ; Schadschneider, Andreas ; Chowdhury, Debashish ; Nishinari, Katsuhiro (2009) Trafficlike collective movement of ants on trails: absence of jammed phase Physical Review Letters, 102 (10). 108001_1-108001_4. ISSN 0031-9007

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Official URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.10...

Related URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.108001

Abstract

We report experimental results on unidirectional trafficlike collective movement of ants on trails. Our work is primarily motivated by fundamental questions on the collective spatiotemporal organization in systems of interacting motile constituents driven far from equilibrium. Making use of the analogies with vehicular traffic, we analyze our experimental data for the spatiotemporal organization of ants on a trail. From this analysis, we extract the flow-density relation as well as the distributions of velocities of the ants and distance headways. Some of our observations are consistent with our earlier models of ant traffic, which are appropriate extensions of the asymmetric simple exclusion process. In sharp contrast to highway traffic and most other transport processes, the average velocity of the ants is almost independent of their density on the trail. Consequently, no jammed phase is observed.

Item Type:Article
Source:Copyright of this article belongs to American Physical Society.
ID Code:8073
Deposited On:25 Oct 2010 10:17
Last Modified:16 May 2016 18:09

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