No Arabic abstract
Here, I review the large-scale properties of collections of active Brownian elongated objects, in particular rods, moving in a dissipative medium/substrate. I address the problem by presenting three different models of decreasing complexity, which I refer to as model I, II, and III, respectively.
Using Brownian Dynamics simulations, we study effective interactions mediated between two identical and impermeable disks (inclusions) immersed in a bath of identical, active (self-propelled), Brownian rods in two spatial dimensions, by assuming that the self-propulsion axis of the rods may generally deviate from their longitudinal axis. When the self-propulsion is transverse (perpendicular to the rod axis), the accumulation of active rods around the inclusions is significantly enhanced, causing a more expansive steric layering (ring formation) of the rods around the inclusions, as compared with the reference case of longitudinally self-propelling rods. As a result, the transversally self-propelling rods also mediate a significantly longer ranged effective interaction between the inclusions. The bath-mediated interaction arises due to the overlaps between the active-rod rings formed around the inclusions, as they are brought into small separations. When the self-propulsion axis is tilted relative to the rod axis, we find an asymmetric imbalance of active-rod accumulation around the inclusion dimer. This leads to a noncentral interaction, featuring an anti-parallel pair of transverse force components and, hence, a bath-mediated torque on the dimer.
Using Brownian dynamics simulations, the motion of active Brownian particles (ABPs) in the presence of fuel (or food) sources is studied. It is an established fact that within confined stationary systems, the activity of ABPs generates density profiles that are enhanced in regions of low activity, which is generally referred to as anti-chemotaxis. We demonstrate that -- contrary to common believes -- in non-stationary setups, emerging here as a result of short fuel bursts, our model ABPs do instead exhibit signatures of chemotactic behavior. In direct competition with inactive, but otherwise identical Brownian particles (BPs), the ABPs are shown to fetch a larger amount of food. From a biological perspective, the ability to turn active would, despite of the absence of sensoric devices, encompass an evolutionary advantage.
We study collections of self-propelled rods (SPR) moving in two dimensions for packing fractions less than or equal to 0.3. We find that in the thermodynamical limit the SPR undergo a phase transition between a disordered gas and a novel phase-separated system state. Interestingly, (global) orientational order patterns -- contrary to what has been suggested -- vanish in this limit. In the found novel state, the SPR self-organize into a highly dynamical, high-density, compact region - which we call aggregate - which is surrounded by a disordered gas. Active stresses build inside aggregates as result of the combined effect of local orientational order and active forces. This leads to the most distinctive feature of these aggregates: constant ejection of polar clusters of SPR. This novel phase-separated state represents a novel state of matter characterized by large fluctuations in volume and shape, related to mass ejection, and exhibits positional as well as orientational local order. SPR systems display new physics unseen in other active matter systems due to the coupling between density, active stresses, and orientational order (such coupling cannot be reduced simply to a coupling between speed and density).
Microorganisms such as bacteria are active matters which consume chemical energy and generate their unique run-and-tumble motion. A swarm of such microorganisms provide a nonequilibrium active environment whose noise characteristics are different from those of thermal equilibrium reservoirs. One important difference is a finite persistence time, which is considerably large compared to that of the equilibrium noise, that is, the active noise is colored. Here, we study a mesoscopic energy-harvesting device (engine) with active reservoirs harnessing this noise nature. For a simple linear model, we analytically show that the engine efficiency can surpass the conventional Carnot bound, thus the power-efficiency tradeoff constraint is released, and the efficiency at the maximum power can overcome the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency. We find that the supremacy of the active engine critically depends on the time-scale symmetry of two active reservoirs.
We present a theory of chemokinetic search agents that regulate directional fluctuations according to distance from a target. A dynamic scattering effect reduces the probability to penetrate regions with high fluctuations and thus search success for agents that respond instantaneously to positional cues. In contrast, agents with internal states that initially suppress chemokinesis can exploit scattering to increase their probability to find the target. Using matched asymptotics between the case of diffusive and ballistic search, we obtain analytic results beyond Fox colored noise approximation.