Motivated by the unique physical properties of biological active matter, e.g., cytoskeletal dynamics in eukaryotic cells, we set up effective two-dimensional (2d coarse-grained hydrodynamic equations for the dynamics of thin active gels with polar or nematic symmetries. We use the well-known three-dimensional (3d descriptions (K. Kruse et al., Eur. Phys. J. E 16, 5 (2005); A. Basu et al., Eur. Phys. J. E 27, 149 (2008)) for thin active-gel samples confined between parallel plates with appropriate boundary conditions to derive the effective 2d constitutive relations between appropriate thermodynamic fluxes and generalised forces for small deviations from equilibrium. We consider three distinct cases, characterised by spatial symmetries and boundary conditions, and show how such considerations dictate the structure of the constitutive relations. We use these to study the linear instabilities, calculate the correlation functions and the diffusion constant of a small tagged particle, and elucidate their dependences on the activity or nonequilibrium drive.
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