Extreme Spontaneous Deformations of Active Crystals

Abstract

We demonstrate that two-dimensional crystals made of active particles can experience extremely large spontaneous deformations without melting. Using particles mostly interacting via pairwise repulsive forces, we show that such active crystals maintain long-range bond order and algebraically-decaying positional order, but with an exponent $\eta$ not limited by the $\frac{1}{3}$ bound given by the (equilibrium) KTHNY theory. We rationalize our findings using linear elastic theory and show the existence of two well-defined effective temperatures quantifying respectively large-scale deformations and bond-order fluctuations. The root of these phenomena lies in the sole time-persistence of the intrinsic axes of particles, and they should thus be observed in many different situations.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Enhancing (quasi-)long-range order in a two-dimensional driven crystal
• Long-range translational order and hyperuniformity in two-dimensional chiral active crystal
• Long-range order in two-dimensional systems with fluctuating active stresses
• A geometric condition for robot-swarm cohesion and cluster-flock transition
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• Crystallization of Chiral Active Brownian Particles at Low Densities
• Theory of Nonequilibrium Crystallization and the Phase Diagram of Active Brownian Spheres
• XY Model with Persistent Noise