152020 20251017144609.0 doi 10.1088/1367-2630/aa8ed7 sideral 143309 ART-2017-143309 eng Yllanes, D. (orcid)0000-0001-7276-2942 How many dissenters does it take to disorder a flock? 2017 Access copy available to the general public Unrestricted We consider the effect of introducing a small number of non-aligning agents in a well-formed flock. To this end, we modify a minimal model of active Brownian particles with purely repulsive (excluded volume) forces to introduce an alignment interaction that will be experienced by all the particles except for a small minority of 'dissenters'. We find that even a very small fraction of dissenters disrupts the flocking state. Strikingly, these motile dissenters are much more effective than an equal number of static obstacles in breaking up the flock. For the studied system sizes we obtain clear evidence of scale invariance at the flocking-disorder transition point and the system can be effectively described with a finite-size scaling formalism. We develop a continuum model for the system which reveals that dissenters act like annealed noise on aligners, with a noise strength that grows with the persistence of the dissenters' dynamics. info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO-FEDER/FIS2015-65078-C2-1-P info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess by https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es 3.579 2017 PHYSICS, MULTIDISCIPLINARY 11 / 78 = 0.141 2017 Q1 T1 1.653 2017 Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous) 2017 Q1 info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion Leoni, M. Marchetti, M.C. 19, 10 (2017), 103026 [16 pp.] New j. phys. New Journal of Physics 1367-2630 3855959 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/152020/files/texto_completo.pdf Versión publicada 591304 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/152020/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon icon Versión publicada oai:zaguan.unizar.es:152020 articulos driver 2025-10-17-14:16:44 ARTICLE