No Arabic abstract
These notes focus on the description of the phases of matter in two dimensions. Firstly, we present a brief discussion of the phase diagrams of bidimensional interacting passive systems, and their numerical and experimental measurements. The presentation will be short and schematic. We will complement these notes with a rather complete bibliography that should guide the students in their study of the development of this very rich subject over the last century. Secondly, we summarise very recent results on the phase diagrams of active Brownian disks and active dumbbell systems in two dimensions. The idea is to identify all the phases and to relate, when this is possible, the ones found in the passive limit with the ones observed at large values of the activity, at high and low densities, and for both types of constituents. Proposals for the mechanisms leading to these phases will be discussed. The physics of bidimensional active systems open many questions, some of which will be listed by the end of the Chapter.
Active matter has been intensely studied for its wealth of intriguing properties such as collective motion, motility-induced phase separation (MIPS), and giant fluctuations away from criticality. However, the precise connection of active materials with their equilibrium counterparts has remained unclear. For two-dimensional (2D) systems, this is also because the experimental and theoretical understanding of the liquid, hexatic, and solid equilibrium phases and their phase transitions is very recent. Here, we use self-propelled particles with inverse-power-law repulsions (but without alignment interactions) as a minimal model for 2D active materials. A kinetic Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm allows us to map out the complete quantitative phase diagram. We demonstrate that the active system preserves all equilibrium phases, and that phase transitions are shifted to higher densities as a function of activity. The two-step melting scenario is maintained. At high activity, a critical point opens up a gas-liquid MIPS region. We expect that the independent appearance of two-step melting and of MIPS is generic for a large class of two-dimensional active systems.
We study crystal melting in two-dimensional antiferromagnets, by analyzing the statistical mechanics of the six-state clock model on a lattice in which defects (dislocations and disclinations) are allowed to appear. We show that the elementary dislocations bind to fractional magnetic vortices. We compute the phase diagram by mapping the system into a Coulomb gas model. Surprisingly, we find that in the limit of dominant magnetic interactions, antiferromagnetism can survive even in the hexatic and liquid phases. The ensuing molten antiferromagnets are topologically ordered and are characterized by spontaneous symmetry breaking of a non-local order parameter.
We numerically investigate the influence of self-attraction on the critical behaviour of a polymer in two dimensions, by means of an analysis of finite-size results of transfer-matrix calculations. The transfer matrix is constructed on the basis of the O($n$) loop model in the limit $n to 0$. It yields finite-size results for the magnetic correlation length of systems with a cylindrical geometry. A comparison with the predictions of finite-size scaling enables us to obtain information about the phase diagram as a function of the chemical potential of the loop segments and the strength of the attractive potential. Results for the magnetic scaling dimension can be interpreted in terms of known universality classes. In particular, when the attractive potential is increased, we observe the crossover between polymer critical behaviour of the self-avoiding walk type to behaviour described earlier for the theta point.
We compute the shear and bulk viscosities, as well as the thermal conductivity of an ultrarelativistic fluid obeying the relativistic Boltzmann equation in 2+1 space-time dimensions. The relativistic Boltzmann equation is taken in the single relaxation time approximation, based on two approaches, the first, due to Marle and using the Eckart decomposition, and the second, proposed by Anderson and Witting and using the Landau-Lifshitz decomposition. In both cases, the local equilibrium is given by a Maxwell-Juettner distribution. It is shown that, apart from slightly different numerical prefactors, the two models lead to a different dependence of the transport coefficients on the fluid temperature, quadratic and linear, for the case of Marle and Anderson-Witting, respectively. However, by modifying the Marle model according to the prescriptions given in Ref.[1], it is found that the temperature dependence becomes the same as for the Anderson-Witting model.
Collective motion is often modeled within the framework of active fluids, where the constituent active particles, when interactions with other particles are switched off, perform normal diffusion at long times. However, in biology, single-particle superdiffusion and fat-tailed displacement statistics are also widespread. The collective properties of interacting systems exhibiting such anomalous diffusive dynamics, which we call active Levy matter, cannot be captured by current active fluid theories. Here, we formulate a hydrodynamic theory of active Levy matter by coarse-graining a microscopic model of aligning polar active particles that perform superdiffusion akin to Levy flights. Applying a linear stability analysis on the hydrodynamic equations at the onset of collective motion, we find that, in contrast to its conventional counterpart, the order-disorder transition can become critical. We then estimate the corresponding critical exponents by finite size scaling analysis of numerical simulations. Our work highlights the novel physics in active matter that integrates both anomalous diffusive motility and inter-particle interactions.