Today we are more than proud. Our partner Celia Lozano, Head of Datahas published an article in Nature Scientific Reports (nature.com)on artificial intelligence and its role in cohesion in the flow of active particles through bottlenecks.
In the publication, he has reflected on how physics reveals the property of solid bodies to get stuck when they are forced The traffic jams are caused by a narrowing, creating an arch that plugs the exit. As in everyday life, clogging occurs again and again. For example, grains of salt often clog the openings of a salt shaker, but in this case, shaking the container is enough to get the seasoning flowing again.
As Lozano states in his article, in general, clogging occurs in all situations where a large number of discrete solids, be they stones, salt, animals or people, are attempted to pass through a narrow place, in some cases with tragic consequences, such as stampedes of people at mass events.
This behaviour has been studied in great detail for inert particles flowing through geometric constraints. However, the effect of cohesionwhich often dominates the behaviour of living systems that form groups, has not been investigated so far.
In the article published in nature.com, he has investigated, from an experimental and numerical point of view, together with his collaborators at the University of Konstanz from the group of Professor Clemens Bechinger, a externally programmable microparticle system that can be programmed externally to movedepending on the circumstances, through the use of artificial intelligence. This allows detailed information to be obtained on how communication between the moving particles affects their collective properties. The microparticles are propelled through a narrowing and the interactions are precisely controlled by computer.
In this specific case, they have found that interactions are dominated by cohesion and alignment is motivated by social rules that govern behaviours in many living collective systems. Surprisingly, they have found that cohesion has only a very weak influence on particle flowup to a certain threshold. This threshold is the transition point from an arc-dominated blocking regime with low cohesive strength to a cohesion-dominated blocking regime with high cohesive strength.
