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Gregarious vs Individualistic Behavior in Vicsek Swarms and the Onset of First-Order Phase Transitions

The Standard Vicsek Model (SVM) is a minimal nonequilibrium model of self-propelled particles that appears to capture the essential ingredients of critical flocking phenomena. In the SVM, particles tend to align with each other and form ordered flocks of collective motion; however, perturbations controlled by a noise term lead to a noise-driven, continuous order-disorder phase transition. In this work, we extend the SVM by introducing a parameter $α$ that allows particles to be individualistic instead of gregarious, i.e. to choose a direction of motion independently of their neighbors. By focusing on the small-noise regime, we show that a relatively small probability of individualistic motion (around 10%) is sufficient to drive the system from a Vicsek-like ordered phase to a disordered phase. Despite the fact that the $α-$extended Model preserves the O(n) symmetry, the interaction range, as well as the dimensionality of the underlying SVM, this novel phase transition is found to be discontinuous (first-order), an intriguing manifestation of the richness of the nonequilibrium flocking/swarming phenomenon.