Charles' paper published in Soft Matter!

Charles’ work — numerically studying million-particle-scale simulations of Voronoi flocking models and understanding their dynamical phases — has been published in Soft Matter! A long-standing debate concerned the nature of the disorder-order transition in Vicsek-like flocking models whose neighbors are chosen according to “topological” rather than “metric” criteria. By exploiting GPU-accelerated code to simulate these systems both at extremely large scales and in the time-continuous limit, Charles found clear evidence of a transition between disordered and ordered phases mediated by a banded phase. Unlike standard metric models, this banded phase seems to be characterized by a most unstable mode whose lengthscale is set by the system size. A tour-de-force of numerical work in the field — read more here!