Cage Length Controls the Non-Monotonic Dynamics of Active Glassy Matter

Abstract

Dense active matter is gaining widespread interest due to its remarkable similarity with conventional glass-forming materials. However, active matter is inherently out-of-equilibrium and even simple models such as active Brownian particles (ABPs) and active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck particles (AOUPs) behave markedly differently from their passive counterparts. Controversially, this difference has been shown to manifest itself via either a speedup, slowdown, or non-monotonic change of the glassy relaxation dynamics. Here we rationalize these seemingly contrasting views on the departure from equilibrium by identifying the ratio of the short-time length scale to the cage length, i.e. the length scale of local particle caging, as a vital and unifying control parameter for active glassy matter. In particular, we explore the glassy dynamics of both thermal and athermal ABPs and AOUPs upon increasing the persistence time. We find that for all studied systems there is an optimum of the dynamics; this optimum occurs when the cage length coincides with the corresponding short-time length scale of the system, which is either the persistence length for athermal systems or a combination of the persistence length and a diffusive length scale for thermal systems. This new insight, for which we also provide a simple physical argument, allows us to reconcile and explain the manifestly disparate departures from equilibrium reported in many previous studies of dense active materials.

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• Mode-coupling theory for mixtures of athermal self-propelled particles
• Emergent Mesoscale Correlations in Active Solids with Noisy Chiral Dynamics
• Aging or DEAD: origin of the non-monotonic response to weak self-propulsion in active glasses
• The Influence of Particle Softness on Active Glassy Dynamics
• Inhomogeneous entropy production in active crystals with point imperfections
• Time-dependent properties of run-and-tumble particles: Density relaxation
• Bacterial diffusion in disordered media, by forgetting the media
• Enhanced Long Wavelength Mermin-Wagner Fluctuations in Active Crystals and Glasses
• Computational modeling of the physical features that influence breast cancer invasion into adipose tissue
• Scaling the glassy dynamics of active particles: Tunable fragility and reentrance