Susceptibility of Polar Flocks to Spatial Anisotropy

We study the effect of spatial anisotropy on polar flocks by investigating active q-state clock models in two dimensions. In contrast to the equilibrium case, we find that any amount of anisotropy is asymptotically relevant, drastically altering the phenomenology from that of the rotationally invariant case. All of the well-known physics of the Vicsek model, from giant density fluctuations to microphase separation, is replaced by that of the active Ising model, with short-range correlations and complete phase separation. These changes appear beyond a length scale that diverges in the q→∞ limit, so that the Vicsek-model phenomenology is observed in finite systems for weak enough anisotropy, i.e., sufficiently high q. We provide a scaling argument which explains why anisotropy has such different effects in the passive and active cases.