Time scales of inertial motion in the collective dynamics of underdamped active phase field crystal systems

Abstract

Many active matter systems, mostly on the microscopic scale, are well approximated as overdamped, meaning that any inertial momentum is immediately dissipated by the environment. On the other hand, especially for macroscopic active systems but also for many mesoscopic ones the time scale of inertial motion can become large enough to be relevant for the dynamics. This raises the question how collective dynamics in active matter is influenced by inertia. In this article we implement and study an underdamped active phase field crystal model. We focus on how the collective dynamics changes with the time scale of inertial motion. While the state diagram stays unaltered in this modification, the relaxation time scale towards the steady state considerably increases with particle mass. Our numerical results suggest that transiently stable rotating clusters of density peaks act as defects which need to decay before the final state of global collective motion forms. We extract the formation and decay times quantitatively. Finally, we give a physical intuition for the formation and decay of rotating clusters to qualitatively explain how the extracted times depend on mass.

arXiv comment6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (24)

• Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments
• Interaction Ruling Animal Collective Behaviour Depends on Topological rather than Metric Distance: Evidence from a Field Study
• Motility-Induced Phase Separation
• Meso-scale turbulence in living fluids
• Modeling Elasticity in Crystal Growth
• Modeling Elastic and Plastic Deformations in Non-Equilibrium Processing Using Phase Field Crystals
• Swarming and swirling in self-propelled polar granular rods
• Emergent vortices in populations of colloidal rollers
• Inertial effects of self-propelled particles: from active Brownian to active Langevin motion
• Relevance of Metric-Free Interactions in Flocking Phenomena
• Inertial delay of self-propelled particles
• Emergence of active nematic behaviour in monolayers of isotropic cells
• Motility-induced temperature difference in coexisting phases
• Active Particles Bound by Information Flows
• Traveling and resting crystals in active systems
• Collective Motion of Self-Propelled Particles with Memory
• Dynamical Density Functional Theory For Microswimmers
• Active crystals and their stability
• Derivation of a hydrodynamic theory for mesoscale dynamics in microswimmer suspensions
• Hydrodynamic length-scale selection and effective viscosity in microswimmer suspensions
• Phototactic Robot Tunable by Sensorial Delays
• Unidirectional laning and migrating cluster crystals in confined self-propelled particle systems
• Extended dynamical density functional theory for colloidal mixtures with temperature gradients
• Influence of Sensorial Delay on Clustering and Swarming

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Inertial self-propelled particles
• Role of rotational inertia for collective phenomena in active matter
• From a microscopic inertial active matter model to the Schrödinger equation
• Dynamics of active particles with translational and rotational inertia
• Jerky active matter: a phase field crystal model with translational and orientational memory
• Perspective: New directions in dynamical density functional theory
• Derivation and analysis of a phase field crystal model for a mixture of active and passive particles
• Statistics for an object actively driven by spontaneous symmetry breaking into reversible directions
• Dynamical field theories for biaxial liquid crystals