title: Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in collective active motion.
abstract: Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of active swimmers in three dimensions that effectively incorporates hydrodynamic interactions. We perform large-scale molecular dynamics simulations (up to 10(6) particles) and find long-lived metastable collective states that exhibit chiral organization although the interactions are achiral. We elucidate under which conditions these chiral states will emerge and grow to large scales. To explore the complex phase space available to the system, we perform nonequilibrium quenches on a one-dimensional Lebwohl-Lasher model with periodic boundary conditions to study the likelihood of formation of chiral structures.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), Am Fassberg 17, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Rebekka E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Breier
authors.affiliation: Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 44242, USA.
authors.forename: Robin L B
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Selinger
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy.|School of Physics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ciccotti
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), Am Fassberg 17, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Herminghaus
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), Am Fassberg 17, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Marco G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Mazza