Mapping two-dimensional polar active fluids to two-dimensional soap and one-dimensional sandblasting

Leiming Chen (), Chiu Fan Lee () and John Toner ()
Additional contact information
Leiming Chen: College of Science, China University of Mining and Technology
Chiu Fan Lee: Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus
John Toner: University of Oregon

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Active fluids and growing interfaces are two well-studied but very different non-equilibrium systems. Each exhibits non-equilibrium behaviour distinct from that of their equilibrium counterparts. Here we demonstrate a surprising connection between these two: the ordered phase of incompressible polar active fluids in two spatial dimensions without momentum conservation, and growing one-dimensional interfaces (that is, the 1+1-dimensional Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation), in fact belong to the same universality class. This universality class also includes two equilibrium systems: two-dimensional smectic liquid crystals, and a peculiar kind of constrained two-dimensional ferromagnet. We use these connections to show that two-dimensional incompressible flocks are robust against fluctuations, and exhibit universal long-ranged, anisotropic spatio-temporal correlations of those fluctuations. We also thereby determine the exact values of the anisotropy exponent ζ and the roughness exponents χx,y that characterize these correlations.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12215 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms12215

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12215

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().