Inertia-induced nucleation-like motility-induced phase separation

Abstract

Motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) is of great importance and has been extensively researched in overdamped systems, nevertheless, what impacts inertia will bring on kinetics of MIPS is lack of investigation. Here, we find a nucleation-like MIPS instead of spinodal decomposition in the overdamped case, i.e. not only the phase transition changes from continuous to discontinuous, but also the formation of clusters does not exhibit any coarsening regime. This remarkable kinetics of MIPS stems from a competition between activity-induced accumulation of particles and inertia-induced suppression of clustering process. More interestingly, the discontinuity of MIPS still exists even when the ratio of particle mass to the friction coefficient reduces to be very small such as 10−4. Our findings emphasize the importance of inertia induced kinetics of MIPS, and may open a new perspective on understanding the nature of MIPS in active systems.

Nonequilibrium Dynamics of Chemically Active Particles

“…() and (). We found that the inertia can lead to a nucleation‐like MIPS instead of the one via spinodal decomposition in the overdamped case, [ 63 ] characterized by a jump of LDD peaks (Figures 6(a) and (b)) and the disappearance of coarsening growth of clusters (Figures 6(c) and (d)). In addition, as inertia becomes stronger, this distinct kinetics of MIPS still exists and both the discontinuity and MIPS nucleation barrier are enhanced as shown in Figures 6(e) and (f).…”

“…[65] with permissions, and from Ref. 63 under the terms of the Creative Commons license for open access articles. Copyright 2015 The Royal Society of Chemist.…”

Intrinsic structure perspective for MIPS interfaces in two dimensional systems of Active Brownian Particles

“…MIPS has been detected in experimental setups of active colloids [11,[14][15][16] and thoroughly characterised in numerical simulations of Active Brownian particles (ABP) [1,5,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Moreover, MIPS cannot be avoided in the presence of inertial effects [24,25], when considering a suspension of active particles moving on a lattice [26,27], or when an amount of passive particles is added to the active suspension [28][29][30].…”

Tuning Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions with Inertia

“…Many-Body Phase Behavior.-While the impact of inertia on active dynamics has been recently investigated [38][39][40][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51], a generalized understanding of its impact on active phase behavior has remained elusive. Before proceeding to demonstrate the impact of inertia on the many-body phase behavior of driven systems, we briefly discuss the model systems and their known equilibrium limit.…”