Self-Organized Critical Coexistence Phase in Repulsive Active Particles

We revisit motility-induced phase separation in two models of active particles interacting by pairwise repulsion. We show that the resulting dense phase contains gas bubbles distributed algebraically up to a typically large cutoff scale. At large enough system size and/or global density, all the gas may be contained inside the bubbles, at which point the system is microphase-separated with a finite cut-off bubble scale. We observe that the ordering is anomalous, with different dynamics for the coarsening of the dense phase and of the gas bubbles. This phenomenology is reproduced by a reduced bubble model that implements the basic idea of reverse Ostwald ripening put forward in Tjhung et al. [Phys. Rev. X 8, 031080 (2018)].