Domain Growth in the Active Model B: Critical and Off-critical Composition

Abstract

We study the ordering kinetics of an assembly of {\it active Brownian particles} (ABPs) on a two-dimensional substrate. We use a coarse-grained equation for the composition order parameter $\psi (\mathbf{r},t)$, where $\mathbf{r}$ and $t$ denote space and time, respectively. The model is similar to the {\it Cahn-Hilliard equation} or {\it Model B} (MB) for a conserved order parameter with an additional activity term of strength $\lambda$. This model has been introduced by Wittkowski et al., Nature Comm. {\bf 5}, 4351 (2014), and is termed {\it Active Model B} (AMB). We study domain growth kinetics and dynamical scaling of the correlation function for the AMB with critical and off-critical compositions. The quantity $P = \mbox{sign}(λ\times ψ_0)$ governs the asymptotic growth kinetics for the off-critical AMB, where ${\psi }_0$ denotes the average order parameter. For negative $P$, the domain growth law is the usual Lifshitz-Slyozov growth law with $L(t,\lambda )\sim t^{1/3}$. For positive $P$, the growth law shows a crossover to a novel growth law $L(t,\lambda )\sim t^{1/4}$. Further, the correlation function shows good dynamical scaling for the off-critical AMB but the scaling function has a dependency on ${\psi }_0$ and $\lambda$. We also study the effects of both additive and multiplicative noise on the AMB.

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Domain Growth Kinetics in Active Binary Mixtures