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Peer-reviewedCC BYPhysical Review Letters

Breakdown of Emergent Chiral Order and Defect Chaos in Nonreciprocal Flocks

  • Charlotte Myin
  • Suropriya Saha
  • Benoît Mahault
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Abstract

We show that chiral order in two-dimensional nonreciprocal flocking mixtures is generically unstable. Combining large-scale agent-based simulations with a coarse-grained continuum description, we demonstrate that rotating chiral states emerging from antisymmetric couplings are destroyed by the proliferation of topological defects. The resulting dynamics is spatiotemporally chaotic and characterized by a finite correlation length that diverges as nonreciprocity vanishes. On length scales below this cutoff, density and orientational order fluctuations remain scale-free, but the associated scaling exhibits nonuniversal exponents. We attribute this atypical behavior to the coupling between density and order, which causes topological defects to act as persistent sources of nonlinear fluctuations.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{myin2026breakdown,
  title = {{Breakdown of Emergent Chiral Order and Defect Chaos in Nonreciprocal Flocks}},
  author = {Charlotte Myin and Suropriya Saha and Benoît Mahault},
  journal = {Physical Review Letters},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.1103/c6dy-38z1},
  url = {https://hal.science/hal-05743134v1},
  note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Breakdown of Emergent Chiral Order and Defect Chaos in Nonreciprocal Flocks
AU  - Charlotte Myin
AU  - Suropriya Saha
AU  - Benoît Mahault
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/08
JO  - Physical Review Letters
DO  - 10.1103/c6dy-38z1
UR  - https://hal.science/hal-05743134v1
AB  - We show that chiral order in two-dimensional nonreciprocal flocking mixtures is generically unstable. Combining large-scale agent-based simulations with a coarse-grained continuum description, we demonstrate that rotating chiral states emerging from antisymmetric couplings are destroyed by the proliferation of topological defects. The resulting dynamics is spatiotemporally chaotic and characterized by a finite correlation length that diverges as nonreciprocity vanishes. On length scales below this cutoff, density and orientational order fluctuations remain scale-free, but the associated scaling exhibits nonuniversal exponents. We attribute this atypical behavior to the coupling between density and order, which causes topological defects to act as persistent sources of nonlinear fluctuations.
SN  - 0031-9007
SN  - 1079-7114
ER  -