The inconvenient truth about flocks
Abstract
We reanalyze the hydrodynamic theory of "flocks" that is, polar ordered "dry" active fluids in two dimensions. For "Malthusian" flocks, in which birth and death cause the density to relax quickly, thereby eliminating density as a hydrodynamic variable, we are able to obtain two exact scaling laws relating the three scaling exponents characterizing the long-distance properties of these systems. We also show that it is highly plausible that such flocks display long-range order in two dimensions. In addition, we demonstrate that for "immortal" flocks, in which the number of flockers is conserved, the extra non-linearities allowed by the presence of an extra slow variable (number density) make it impossible to obtain any exact scaling relations between the exponents. We thereby demonstrate that several past published claims of exact exponents for Malthusian and immortal flocks are all incorrect.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.17064,
title = {The inconvenient truth about flocks},
author = {Leiming Chen and Patrick Jentsch and Chiu Fan Lee and Ananyo Maitra and Sriram Ramaswamy and John Toner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17064},
year = {2025}
}