  In this paper we consider interacting particle systems which are frequently
used to model collective behavior in animal swarms and other applications. We
study the stability of orientationally aligned formations called flock
solutions, one of the typical patterns emerging from such dynamics. We provide
an analysis showing that the nonlinear stability of flocks in second-order
models entirely depends on the linear stability of the first-order aggregation
equation. Flocks are shown to be nonlinearly stable as a family of states under
reasonable assumptions on the interaction potential. Furthermore, we
numerically verify that commonly used potentials satisfy these hypotheses and
investigate the nonlinear stability of flocks by an extensive case-study of
uniform perturbations.
