Small activity differences drive phase separation in active-passive polymer mixtures

Abstract

Recent theoretical studies found that mixtures of active and passive colloidal particles phase separate but only at very high activity ratio. The high value poses serious obstacles for experimental exploration of this phenomenon. Here we show using simulations that when the active and passive particles are polymers, the critical activity ratio decreases with the polymer length. This not only facilitates the experiments but also has implications on the DNA organization in living cell nuclei. Entropy production can be used as an accurate indicator of this non-equilibrium phase transition.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Effective equilibrium states in mixtures of active particles driven by colored noise
• Demixing of active particles in the presence of external fields
• Scalable and fast heterogeneous molecular simulation with predictive parallelization schemes
• Interface repulsion and lamellar structures in thin films of homopolymer blends due to thermal oscillations