Perspective: Nonequilibrium glassy dynamics in dense systems of active particles

Abstract

Despite the diversity of materials designated as active matter, virtually all active systems undergo a form of dynamic arrest when crowding and activity compete, reminiscent of the dynamic arrest observed in colloidal and molecular fluids undergoing a glass transition. We present a short perspective on recent and ongoing efforts to understand how activity competes with other physical interactions in dense systems. We first review recent experimental work on active materials that uncovered both classic signatures of glassy dynamics and intriguing novel phenomena at large density. We introduce a minimal model of self-propelled particles where the competition between interparticle interactions, crowding, and self-propulsion can be studied in great detail. We discuss more complex models that include some additional, material-specific ingredients. We end with some general perspectives on dense active materials, suggesting directions for future research, in particular for theoretical work.

16 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Flocking without alignment interactions in attractive active Brownian particles
• The Parental Active Model: a unifying stochastic description of self-propulsion
• Emergence of Multiscale Dynamics in Colloidal Gels
• Escape of a passive particle from activity-induced energy landscape: Emergence of slow and fast effective diffusion
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• Multiple dynamic regimes in a coarsening foam
• The Influence of Particle Softness on Active Glassy Dynamics
• The Many Faces of Fluctuation-Dissipation Relations Out of Equilibrium
• Tagged-particle motion in quasi-confined colloidal hard-sphere liquids
• Active matter in infinite dimensions: Fokker-Planck equation and dynamical mean-field theory at low density