  A time-delayed response of individual living organisms to information
exchanged within flocks or swarms leads to the emergence of complex collective
behaviors. A recent experimental setup by (Khadka et al 2018 Nat. Commun. 9
3864), employing synthetic microswimmers, allows to emulate and study such
behavior in a controlled way, in the lab. Motivated by these experiments, we
study a system of N Brownian particles interacting via a retarded harmonic
interaction. For $N \leq 3$ , we characterize its collective behavior
analytically, by solving the pertinent stochastic delay-differential equations,
and for $N>3$ by Brownian dynamics simulations. The particles form
molecule-like non-equilibrium structures which become unstable with increasing
number of particles, delay time, and interaction strength. We evaluate the
entropy and information fluxes maintaining these structures and, to
quantitatively characterize their stability, develop an approximate
time-dependent transition-state theory to characterize transitions between
different isomers of the molecules. For completeness, we include a
comprehensive discussion of the analytical solution procedure for systems of
linear stochastic delay differential equations in finite dimension, and new
results for covariance and time-correlation matrices.
