Fluctuating kinetic theory and fluctuating hydrodynamics of aligning active particles: the dilute limit

TL;DR

This paper develops a fluctuating kinetic and hydrodynamic theory for dilute, aligning active particles, revealing non-Gaussian fluctuations at the kinetic level and Gaussian behavior at the hydrodynamic scale, with noise depending on particle interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fluctuating kinetic theory and hydrodynamics for dilute active matter, accounting for the binary interaction-driven fluctuations absent in previous models.

Findings

Fluctuations at the kinetic level are non-Gaussian and interaction-dependent.

Hydrodynamic fluctuations are Gaussian, with noise proportional to density squared.

The theory applies to polar and nematic aligning active particles.

Abstract

Kinetic and hydrodynamic theories are widely employed for describing the collective behaviour of active matter systems. At the fluctuating level, these have been obtained from explicit coarse-graining procedures in the limit where each particle interacts weakly with many others, so that the total forces and torques exerted on each of them is of order unity at all times. Such limit is however not relevant for dilute systems that mostly interact via alignment; there, collisions are rare and make the self-propulsion direction to change abruptly. We derive a fluctuating kinetic theory, and the corresponding fluctuating hydrodynamics, for aligning self-propelled particles in the limit of dilute systems. We discover that fluctuations at kinetic level are not Gaussian and depend on the interactions among particles, but that only their Gaussian part survives in the hydrodynamic limit. At variance with fluctuating hydrodynamics for weakly interacting particles, we find that the noise variance at hydrodynamic level depends on the interaction rules among particles and is proportional to the square of the density, reflecting the binary nature of the aligning process. The results of this paper, which are derived for polar self-propelled particles with polar alignment, could be straightforwardly extended to polar particles with nematic alignment or to fully nematic systems.