Authors
Vijay Narayan, Sriram Ramaswamy, Narayanan Menon
Publication date
2007/7/6
Journal
Science
Volume
317
Issue
5834
Pages
105-108
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Description
Coherently moving flocks of birds, beasts, or bacteria are examples of living matter with spontaneous orientational order. How do these systems differ from thermal equilibrium systems with such liquid crystalline order? Working with a fluidized monolayer of macroscopic rods in the nematic liquid crystalline phase, we find giant number fluctuations consistent with a standard deviation growing linearly with the mean, in contrast to any situation where the central limit theorem applies. These fluctuations are long-lived, decaying only as a logarithmic function of time. This shows that flocking, coherent motion, and large-scale inhomogeneity can appear in a system in which particles do not communicate except by contact.
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