Active hydrodynamics of synchronization and ordering in moving oscillators

TL;DR

This paper develops a hydrodynamic theory to understand how active motion and phase fluctuations influence synchronization and order in large populations of moving oscillators, revealing complex behaviors and phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a generic hydrodynamic framework capturing the mutual influence of mobility and phase fluctuations in active oscillators, a novel approach in the study of collective dynamics.

Findings

Identification of conditions for long-range and quasi-long-range order.

Discovery of instabilities leading to desynchronization.

Complex dependence of synchronization on active effects.

Abstract

The nature of emergent collective behaviors of moving physical agents interacting with their neighborhood is a long-standing open issue in physical and biological systems alike. This calls for studies on the control of synchronization and the degree of order in a collection of diffusively moving noisy oscillators. We address this by constructing a generic hydrodynamic theory for active phase fluctuations in a collection of large number of nearly phase-coherent moving oscillators in two dimensions. Our theory describes the general situation where phase fluctuations and oscillator mobility mutually affect each other. We show that the interplay between the active effects and the mobility of the oscillators leads to a variety of phenomena, ranging from synchronization with long range, nearly long range and quasi long range orders to instabilities and desynchronization with short range order of the oscillator phases. We highlight the complex dependences of synchronization on the active effects. These should be testable in wide ranging systems, e.g., oscillating chemical reactions in the presence of different reaction inhibitors/facilitators, live oriented cytoskeletal extracts, or vertebrate segmentation clocks.