Uniform position alignment estimate of spherical flocking model with inter-particle bonding forces

Abstract: We present a sufficient condition of the complete position flocking theorem for the Cucker-Smale type model on the unit sphere with an inter-particle bonding force. For this second order dynamical system derived in [Choi, S.-H., Kwon, D. and Seo, H.: Cucker-Smale type flocking models on a sphere. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.10693, 2020] by using the rotation operator in three dimensional sphere, we obtain an exponential decay estimate for the diameter of agents' positions as well as time-asymptotic flocking for a class of initial data. The sufficient condition for the initial data depends only on the communication rate and inter-particle bonding parameter but not the number of agents. The lack of momentum conservation and the curved space domain make it difficult to apply the standard methodology used in the original Cucker-Smale model. To overcome this and obtain a uniform position alignment estimate, we use an energy dissipation property of this system and transform the Cucker-Smale type flocking model into an inhomogeneous system of differential equations of which solution contains the position and velocity diameters. The coefficients of the transformed system are controlled by the communication rate and a uniform upper bound of velocities obtained by the energy dissipation.