Active matter, microreversibility, and thermodynamics

Abstract

Active matter, comprising many active agents interacting and moving in fluids or more complex environments, is a commonly occurring state of matter in biological and physical systems. By its very nature active matter systems exist in nonequilibrium states. In this paper the active agents are small Janus colloidal particles that use chemical energy provided by chemical reactions occurring on their surfaces for propulsion through a diffusiophoretic mechanism. As a result of interactions among these colloids, either directly or through fluid velocity and concentration fields, they may act collectively to form structures such as dynamic clusters. A general nonequilibrium thermodynamics framework for the description of such systems is presented that accounts for both self-diffusiophoresis and diffusiophoresis due to external concentration gradients, and is consistent with microreversibility. It predicts the existence of a reciprocal effect of diffusiophoresis back onto the reaction rate for the entire collection of colloids in the system, as well as the existence of a clustering instability that leads to nonequilibrium inhomogeneous system states.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Active matter under control: Insights from response theory
• Macroscopic Stochastic Thermodynamics
• Thermodynamics of active matter: Tracking dissipation across scales
• How to define temperature in active systems?
• Inertial effects on rectification and diffusion of active Brownian particles in an asymmetric channel
• Clustering of chemically propelled nanomotors in chemically active environments
• Diffusion coefficient and power spectrum of active particles with a microscopically reversible mechanism of self-propelling
• AMEP: The Active Matter Evaluation Package for Python
• Self-organization of active colloids mediated by chemical interactions
• Mass-based separation of active Brownian particles in an asymmetric channel
• The non-equilibrium thermodynamics of active suspensions
• Microcanonical ensemble out of equilibrium
• Insertion space in repulsive active matter