Hurricane dynamics in a membrane

We study driven microscopic rotors immersed in a membrane. We show that for small distances, interactions between rotors are identical to interactions between vortices in an ideal 2D Euler fluid, while the longer-ranged ones relate to classical models of atmospheric dynamics. Going beyond idealized interactions between rotors, we examine the more realistic setting where rotors also interact through local repulsion. We show that initially random distributions of rotors will rapidly self-organize into rotating uniform lattices or random hyperuniform structures, and exhibit activity-induced phase separation.