Large-Scale Cluster Formation at n=250,000
A single bound structure of 12,472 particles emerged from a 250,000-particle swarm, mid-run - about 5% of the entire simulation.
● Posons ● Negons ● the identified 12,472-particle cluster (tracked across every frame, not just at the end)
Run Parameters
| Total particles | 250,000 (125,000 posons + 125,000 negons) |
| Initial diameter | 170.7 |
| Integration mode | Direct Normalization |
| Force computation | Brute force (exact, not Barnes-Hut approximated) |
| Signals enabled | Crowding, proximity, acceleration, velocity-matching, cluster identification |
| Steps completed | 3,211 of a planned 6,000 (run manually interrupted) |
Observations
- The largest structure found anywhere in the run was 12,472 particles, appearing around step 3,206 - by far the largest bound cluster seen in any run to date in this project.
- The same particles were tracked back across the entire clip (not just identified at their peak), showing the cluster's members starting scattered throughout the diffuse swarm and gradually converging into a single dense structure over time.
- This sits alongside a broader, separately-confirmed pattern in these runs: nearest-neighbor pairs increasingly skew opposite-charge as a run progresses (over 90% by the end of comparable runs), consistent with real dipole-like binding from the attraction/repulsion force law.
Read honestly: this run was manually interrupted before reaching its planned step count, and cluster membership for the clip above is reconstructed from the nearest available saved frame (56 raw steps from the cluster's true peak), not an exact match to that instant. The full methodology and caveats are in the linked notebook below.
Go Deeper
The full cluster-tracking analysis - including how the longest-lasting and largest clusters were identified and resolved to real particle IDs - is available as a rendered notebook.