Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will present a survey of the main results about first and second order models of swarming where repulsion and attraction are modeled through pairwise potentials. We will mainly focus on the stability of the fascinating patterns that you get by random particle simulations, flocks and mills, and their qualitative behavior. Qualitative properties of local minimizers of the interaction energies are crucial in order to understand these complex behaviors. Compactly supported global minimizers determine the flock patterns whose existence is related to the classical H-stability in statistical mechanics and the classical obstacle problem for differential operators.