TY - JOUR A1 - Mokhtari, Zahra A1 - Patterson, Robert I. A. A1 - Höfling, Felix T1 - Spontaneous trail formation in populations of auto-chemotactic walkers JF - New Journal of Physics Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ac43ec VL - 24 SP - 013012 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Mokhtari, Zahra A1 - Patterson, Robert I. A. A1 - Höfling, Felix T1 - Spontaneous trail formation in populations of auto-chemotactic walkers N2 - We study the formation of trails in populations of self-propelled agents that make oriented deposits of pheromones and also sense such deposits to which they then respond with gradual changes of their direction of motion. Based on extensive off-lattice computer simulations aiming at the scale of insects, e.g., ants, we identify a number of emerging stationary patterns and obtain qualitatively the non-equilibrium \add{state} diagram of the model, spanned by the strength of the agent--pheromone interaction and the number density of the population. In particular, we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of persistent, macroscopic trails, and highlight some behaviour that is consistent with a dynamic phase transition. This includes a characterisation of the mass of system-spanning trails as a potential order parameter. We also propose a dynamic model for a few macroscopic observables, including the sub-population size of trail-following agents, which captures the early phase of trail formation. T3 - ZIB-Report - 21-36 Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-84466 SN - 1438-0064 ER -