Classical Nucleation Theory for Active Fluid Phase Separation

Abstract

Classical nucleation theory (CNT), linking rare nucleation events to the free energy landscape of a growing nucleus, is central to understanding phase-change kinetics in passive fluids. Nucleation in non-equilibrium systems is much harder to describe because there is no free energy, but instead a dynamics-dependent quasi-potential that typically must be found numerically. Here we extend CNT to a class of active phase separating systems governed by a minimal field-theoretic model (Active Model B+). In the small noise and supersaturation limits that CNT assumes, we compute analytically the quasi-potential, and hence nucleation barrier, for liquid-vapor phase separation. Crucially to our results, detailed balance, although broken microscopically by activity, is restored along the instanton trajectory, which in CNT involves the nuclear radius as the sole reaction coordinate.

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Cited by in corpus (23)

• Active phase separation: new phenomenology from non-equilibrium physics
• Nucleation of chemically active droplets
• Theory of Capillary Tension and Interfacial Dynamics of Motility-Induced Phases
• Field-Theory of Active Chiral Hard Disks: A First-Principles Approach to Steric Interactions
• Nonequilibrium interfacial properties of chemically driven fluids
• Hyperuniformity in phase ordering: the roles of activity, noise, and non-constant mobility
• Diffusion Transients in Motility-Induced Phase Separation
• Statistical properties of microphase and bubbly phase-separated active fluids
• How does a hyperuniform fluid freeze?
• Evaluation of transition rates from nonequilibrium instantons
• The Mechanics of Nucleation and Growth and the Surface Tensions of Active Matter
• Universal limiting behaviour of reaction-diffusion systems with conservation laws
• Active Young-Dupré Equation: How Self-organized Currents Stabilize Partial Wetting
• Mobility-induced kinetic effects in multicomponent mixtures
• Statistics and morphologies of stable droplets in scalar active fluids
• Chemotaxis-induced phase separation
• Conservation laws and slow dynamics determine the universality class of interfaces in active matter
• Informational Memory Shapes Collective Behavior in Intelligent Swarms
• Hydrodynamics of Cooperation and Self-Interest in a Two-Population Occupation Model
• Non-equilibrium pathways between cluster morphologies in active phase separation: necking, rupture and cavitation
• Active Cahn-Hilliard theory for nonequilibrium phase separation: quantitative macroscopic predictions and a microscopic derivation
• Hyperuniformity in active fluids reshapes nucleation and capillary-wave dynamics
• Enzyme-driven phase separation