English

The Order-disorder Transition in Incompressible Polar Active Fluids with an Easy Axis

Soft Condensed Matter 2025-07-22 v1 Biological Physics

Abstract

Dry active matter in an anisotropic medium is of experimental relevance, and the interplay between anisotropy and the dynamics of the active matter remains under-explored. Here, we derive the hydrodynamic equations of a generic dry polar active fluid that preferentially flows along a particular axis induced by the anisotropy of the medium. We then study its critical behavior at the order-disorder transition in which the symmetry between ``forward" and ``back" along the special axis is spontaneously broken. We obtain the critical static and dynamic exponents, mean velocity, and two point correlation functions exactly in three dimensions, and to two-loop level in two dimensions, by mapping our class of systems to the equilibrium Ising model with dipolar interactions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.15159,
  title  = {The Order-disorder Transition in Incompressible Polar Active Fluids with an Easy Axis},
  author = {Leiming Chen and Chiu Fan Lee and John Toner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15159},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

26 pages, 2 figures