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.

References in corpus (44)

• Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments
• The Mechanics and Statistics of Active Matter
• Athermal Phase Separation of Self-Propelled Particles with no Alignment
• Active Brownian Particles. From Individual to Collective Stochastic Dynamics
• Motility-driven glass and jamming transitions in biological tissues
• Scaling behavior in the $\beta$-relaxation regime of a supercooled Lennard-Jones mixture
• How far from equilibrium is active matter?
• Active Jamming: Self-propelled soft particles at high density
• Active matter
• Full phase diagram of active Brownian disks: from melting to motility-induced phase separation
• Brownian motion of a self-propelled particle
• Nonequilibrium glass transitions in driven and active matter
• A self-propelled particle in an external potential: is there an effective temperature?
• Effective Interactions in Active Brownian Suspensions
• Inertial effects of self-propelled particles: from active Brownian to active Langevin motion
• Multidimensional Stationary Probability Distribution for Interacting Active Particles
• Mode-Coupling Theory of the Glass Transition: A Primer
• Pushing the glass transition towards random close packing using self-propelled hard spheres
• Nonequilibrium glassy dynamics of self-propelled hard disks
• Motility-Induced Microphase and Macrophase Separation in a Two-Dimensional Active Brownian Particle System
• Perspective: Nonequilibrium glassy dynamics in dense systems of active particles
• Glassy dynamics of athermal self-propelled particles: Computer simulations and a nonequilibrium microscopic theory
• Relaxation in a glassy binary mixture: Comparison of the mode-coupling theory to a Brownian dynamics simulation
• The nonequilibrium glassy dynamics of self-propelled particles
• Structural relaxation of polydisperse hard spheres: comparison of the mode-coupling theory to a Langevin dynamics simulation
• Activity controls fragility: A Random First Order Transition Theory for an active glass
• How active forces influence nonequilibrium glass transitions
• Freezing a Flock: Motility-Induced Phase Separation in Polar Active Liquids
• Active fluidization in dense glassy systems
• Active glasses
• Crystallization of self-propelled hard-discs : a new scenario
• Mode-Coupling Theory for Active Brownian Particles
• Active glass: ergodicity breaking dramatically affects response to self-propulsion
• A theory for the dynamics of dense systems of athermal self-propelled particles
• Flowing crystal of self-propelled particles
• Aging and rejuvenation of active matter under topological constraints
• Multiple Types of Aging in Active Glass
• Comparison of structure and transport properties of concentrated hard and soft sphere fluids
• Active matter: quantifying the departure from equilibrium
• Nonmonotonic behavior in the dense assemblies of active colloids
• Mode-coupling theory for the steady-state dynamics of active Brownian particles
• Mode-Coupling Theory for Tagged-Particle Motion of Active Brownian Particles
• Autonomously Probing Viscoelasticity in Disordered Suspensions
• Glassy dynamics of a binary Voronoi fluid: A mode-coupling analysis

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Chloroplasts in plant cells show active glassy behavior under low light conditions
• Entropons as collective excitations in active solids
• Glassy Dynamics in Chiral Fluids
• Active Glassy Dynamics is Unaffected by the Microscopic Details of Self-Propulsion
• 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