English

Moving, reproducing, and dying beyond Flatland: Malthusian flocks in dimensions $d>2$

Soft Condensed Matter 2020-09-02 v2 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

We show that "Malthusian flocks" -- i.e., coherently moving collections of self-propelled entities (such as living creatures) which are being "born" and "dying" during their motion -- belong to a new universality class in spatial dimensions d>2d>2. We calculate the universal exponents and scaling laws of this new universality class to O(ϵ)O(\epsilon) in an ϵ=4d\epsilon=4-d expansion, and find these are different from the "canonical" exponents previously conjectured to hold for "immortal" flocks (i.e., those without birth and death) and shown to hold for incompressible flocks in d>2d>2. Our expansion should be quite accurate in d=3d=3, allowing precise quantitative comparisons between our theory, simulations, and experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.01300,
  title  = {Moving, reproducing, and dying beyond Flatland: Malthusian flocks in dimensions $d>2$},
  author = {Leiming Chen and Chiu Fan Lee and John Toner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.01300},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

5 pges, 2 figures. This new version has essentially the same content as the earlier one, but differs cosmetically, and is the version actually submitted to PRL. The accompanying long paper is titled "A novel nonequilibrium state of matter: a $d=4-\epsilon$ expansion study of Malthusian flocks"