Emergent Phenomena in Anisotropic and Chiral Dense Active Systems

Across scales, from molecules to tissues, dense biological system can exhibit collective dynamics driven by activity and elastic interactions, including flocking transitions and long-range spatiotemporal order. In this talk, I will present two new types of collective phenomena that emerge in dense active systems of components displaying anisotropy and asymmetry that can be found in real-world systems. Firstly, I will describe a novel noise-induced quenched disorder state that emerges in a dense system of active polar disks with anisotropic rotational and translational dynamics. This is a jammed state that appears between the typical ordered and disordered phases and can be described analytically. Secondly, I will describe the influence of the intrinsic chirality of individual active agents on long-range order in dense active systems. Specifically, I will show how long-range chiral order is influenced by the interplay between the rotational diffusion coefficient and chirality, presenting an analytic mode-based descriptions that aligns excellently with our simulations. Our findings suggest that the quenched state and long-range chiral order described above might be observable in natural and artificial dense active systems.