Extreme Spontaneous Deformations of Active Crystals

We demonstrate that two-dimensional crystals made of active particles can experience extremely large spontaneous deformations without melting. Using particles mostly interacting via pairwise repulsive forces, we show that such active crystals maintain long-range bond order and algebraically decaying positional order, but with an exponent η not limited by the 1/3 bound given by the (equilibrium) KTHNY theory. We rationalize our findings using linear elastic theory and show the existence of two well-defined effective temperatures quantifying respectively large-scale deformations and bond-order fluctuations. The root of these phenomena lies in the sole time-persistence of the intrinsic axes of particles, and they should thus be observed in many different situations.