Packed Swarms on Dirt: Two-Dimensional Incompressible Flocks with Quenched and Annealed Disorder

Abstract

We show that incompressible polar active fluids can exhibit an ordered, coherently moving phase even in the presence of quenched disorder in two dimensions. Unlike such active fluids with annealed disorder (i.e., time-dependent random white noise) only, which behave like equilibrium ferromagnets with long-range interactions, this robustness against quenched disorder is a fundamentally nonequilibrium phenomenon. The ordered state belongs to a new universality class, whose scaling laws we calculate using three different renormalization group schemes, which all give scaling exponents within 0.02 of each other, indicating that our results are quite accurate. Our predictions can be quantitatively tested in readily available artificial active systems and imply that biological systems such as cell layers can move coherently in vivo, where disorder is inevitable.