Emergent Phenomena in Anisotropic and Chiral Dense Active Systems*

Across scales, from molecules to tissues, dense biological system can exhibit collective dynamics driven by activity and elastic interactions, including flocking transitions and long-range spatiotemporal order. In this talk, I will present two new types of collective phenomena that emerge in dense active systems of components displaying anisotropy and asymmetry that can be found in real-world systems. Firstly, I will describe a novel noise-induced quenched disorder state that emerges in a dense system of active polar disks with anisotropic rotational and translational dynamics. This  is a jammed state that appears between the typical ordered and disordered phases and can be described analytically. Secondly, I will describe the influence of the intrinsic chirality of individual active agents on long-range order in dense active systems. Specifically, I will show how long-range chiral order is influenced by the interplay between the rotational diffusion coefficient and chirality, presenting an analytic mode-based descriptions that aligns excellently with our simulations. Our findings suggest that the quenched state and long-range chiral order described above might be observable in natural and artificial dense active systems.