Flocking is a paradigmatic example of collective animal behaviour, where global order emerges out of self-organization. Each individual has a tendency to align its flight direction with those of neighbours, and such a simple form of interaction produces a state of collective motion of the group. When compared with other cases of collective ordering, a crucial feature of animal groups is that the interaction network is not fixed in time, as each individual moves and continuously changes its neighbours. The possibility to exchange neighbours strongly enhances the stability of global ordering and the way information is propagated through the group. Here, we assess the relevance of this mechanism in large flocks of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). We find that birds move faster than Brownian walkers both with respect to the centre of mass of the flock, and with respect to each other. Moreover, this behaviour is strongly anisotropic with respect to the direction of motion of the flock. We also measure the amount of neighbours reshuffling and find that neighbours change in time exclusively as a consequence of the random fluctuations in the individual motion, so that no specific mechanism to keep one's neighbours seems to be enforced. On the contrary, our findings suggest that a more complex dynamical process occurs at the border of the flock.

We extend an earlier study [W. A. M. Morgado and S. M. Duarte Queirós, Phys. Rev. E 90, 022110 (2014)PLEEE81539-375510.1103/PhysRevE.90.022110] to the case of a small system subject to nonlinear interaction and in contact with an athermal shot-noise reservoir. We first focus on steady state properties, namely, on the impact of the singular measure of the reservoir in the steady state energy. We introduce the concept of temperatures of higher order, which aim to represent the effect produced by the cumulants of the noise of order larger than 2 in the form of sources of energy of higher order and new response functions such as high-order specific heats that zero out when the system is thermal or linear. Afterwards, we study the effect of the nature of the noise in the heat and energy fluxes and determine asymptotic expressions for its large deviation functions. Finally, by analyzing the probabilistics of the injected power, we verify that the exponential form of its fluctuation relation is only asymptotically valid, whereas in the thermal case it is valid for the injected power at all times.

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Return distributions of the coherent noise model are studied for the system-size-independent case. It is shown that, in this case, these distributions are in the shape of q Gaussians, which are the standard distributions obtained in nonextensive statistical mechanics. Moreover, an exact relation connecting the exponent τ of avalanche size distribution and the q value of appropriate q Gaussian has been obtained as q=(τ+2)/τ . Making use of this relation one can easily determine q parameter values of the appropriate q Gaussians a priori from one of the well-known exponents of the system. Since the coherent noise model has the advantage of producing different τ values by varying a model parameter σ , clear numerical evidences on the validity of the proposed relation have been achieved for various cases. Finally, the effect of the system size has also been analyzed and an analytical expression has been proposed, which is corroborated by the numerical results.

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