A novel nonequilibrium state of matter: a $d=4-ε$ expansion study of Malthusian flocks

Abstract

We show that "Malthusian flocks" -i.e., coherently moving collections of self-propelled entities (such as living creatures) which are being "born" and "dying" during their motion -belong to a new universality class in spatial dimensions d > 2. We calculate the universal exponents and scaling laws of this new universality class to O( ) in a d = 4 − expansion, and find these are different from the "canonical" exponents previously conjectured to hold for "immortal" flocks (i.e., those without birth and death) and shown to hold for incompressible flocks with spatial dimensions in the range of 2 < d ≤ 4. We also obtain a universal amplitude ratio relating the damping of transverse and longitudinal velocity and density fluctuations in these systems. Furthermore, we find a universal separatrix in real (r) space between two regions in which the equal time density correlation δρ(r, t)δρ(0, t) has opposite signs. Our expansion should be quite accurate in d = 3, allowing precise quantitative comparisons between our theory, simulations, and experiments.