Dynamics and Steady States in Excitable Mobile Agent Systems

Fernando Peruani (1, 2) , Gustavo Sibona (3, 4)

1 MPI-PKS - Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems
2 ZIH - Zentrum fuer Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen
3 FaMAF - Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física [Cordoba]
4 CONICET - Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas [Buenos Aires]

We study the spreading of excitations in 2D systems of mobile agents where the excitation is transmitted when a quiescent agent keeps contact with an excited one during a nonvanishing time. We show that the steady states strongly depend on the spatial agent dynamics. Moreover, the coupling between exposition time (ω) and agent-agent contact rate (CR) becomes crucial to understand the excitation dynamics, which exhibits three regimes with CR: no excitation for low CR, an excited regime in which the number of quiescent agents (S) is inversely proportional to CR, and, for high CR, a novel third regime, model dependent, where S scales with an exponent ξ-1, with ξ being the scaling exponent of ω with CR.

Domaines: Biophysique [physics.bio-ph]

Fernando Peruani, Gustavo Sibona. Dynamics and Steady States in Excitable Mobile Agent Systems. Physical Review Letters, 2008, 100 (16), pp.168103. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.168103⟩. ⟨hal-00905227⟩