Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: We show that dry active nematics, e.g., collections of shaken elongated granular particles, exhibit large-scale spatiotemporal chaos made of interacting dense, ordered, bandlike structures in a parameter region including the linear onset of nematic order. These results are obtained from the study of both the well-known (deterministic) hydrodynamic equations describing these systems and of the self-propelled particle model they were derived from. We prove, in particular, that the chaos stems from the generic instability of the band solution of the hydrodynamic equations. Revisiting the status of the strong fluctuations and long-range correlations in the particle model, we show that the giant number fluctuations observed in the chaotic phase are a trivial consequence of density segregation. However anomalous, curvature-driven number fluctuations are present in the homogeneous quasiordered nematic phase and characterized by a nontrivial scaling exponent.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Aberdeen, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Service de Physique de l'État Condensé, CEA Paris-Saclay, CEA Paris-Saclay - Etablissement de Saclay, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, Argonne National Laboratory, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Université Joseph Fourier, Université de Lyon, Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS de Lyon, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique
Language: English
Topic: Micro and Nano Robotics
Subfield: Condensed Matter Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2074857461