Chiral active matter: microscopic ‘torque dipoles’ have more than one hydrodynamic description
Many biological systems, such as bacterial suspensions and actomyosin networks, form polar liquid crystals. These systems are ‘active’ or far-from-equilibrium, due to local forcing of the solvent by the constituent particles. In many cases the source of activity is chiral; since forcing is internally generated, some sort of ‘torque dipole’ is then present locally. But it is not obvious how ‘torque dipoles’ should be encoded in the hydrodynamic equations that describe the system at the continuum level: different authors have arrived at contradictory conclusions on this issue. In this work, we resolve the paradox by presenting a careful derivation, from linear irreversible thermodynamics, of the general equations of motion of a single-component chiral active fluid with spin degrees of freedom. We find that there is no unique hydrodynamic description for such a fluid in the presence of torque dipoles of a given strength. Instead, at least three different hydrodynamic descriptions emerge, depending on whether we decompose each torque dipole as two point torques, two force pairs, or one point torque and one force pair—where point torques create internal angular momenta of the chiral bodies (spin), whereas force pairs impart centre of mass motion that contributes to fluid velocity. By considering a general expansion of the Onsager coefficients, we also derive a new shear-elongation parameter and cross-coupling viscosity, which can lead to unpredicted phenomena even in passive polar liquid crystals. Finally, elimination of the angular variables gives an effective polar hydrodynamics with renormalized active stresses, viscosities and kinetic coefficients. Remarkably, this can include a direct contribution of chiral activity to the equation of motion for the polar order parameter, which survives even in ‘dry’ active systems where the fluid velocity is set to zero.