Hydrodynamic Theory of Two-dimensional Chiral Malthusian Flocks
Abstract
We study the hydrodynamic behavior of two-dimensional chiral dry Malthusian flocks; that is, chiral polar-ordered active matter with neither number nor momentum conservation. We show that, in the absence of fluctuations, such systems generically form a ``time cholesteric", in which the velocity of the entire system rotates uniformly at a fixed frequency b. Fluctuations about this state belong to the universality class of (2+1)-Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation, which implies short-ranged orientational order in the hydrodynamic limit. We then show that, in the limit of weak chirality, the hydrodynamics of a system with reasonable size is expected to governed by the linear regime of the KPZ equation, exhibiting quasi-long-ranged orientational order. Our predictions for the velocity and number density correlations are testable in both simulations and experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.17762,
title = {Hydrodynamic Theory of Two-dimensional Chiral Malthusian Flocks},
author = {Leiming Chen and Chiu Fan Lee and John Toner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.17762},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
38 pages, 4 figures, 1 table