Phase Separation Kinetics in a Polar Active Field Model

Abstract

A milestone of phase separation kinetics is the emergence of universal power laws $\sim t^{1/z}$ governing the domain growth evolution. We investigate a phase-separating polar active model comprising a scalar density field with an advective coupling to a polarization field. Our analysis reveals a novel $\sim t^{0.6}$ regime, which agrees well with the accelerated growth recently observed in simulations of polar active particles. We provide analytical arguments to explain how advection facilitates the creation of topological defects and compresses the domains leading to faster growth. We also show that the $\sim t^{0.6}$ regime is robust to several model generalizations.

Main document with 6 pages 4 figures, Supplemental Material with 27 pages and 20 figures, 8 Movies