Counter Chemotactic Flow in Quasi-One-Dimensional Path

TL;DR

This study explores how chemotaxis influences bidirectional particle flow in quasi-one-dimensional systems, revealing how pheromone evaporation rates affect flow efficiency at different densities.

Contribution

It introduces a modified model allowing shared lanes for particles and analyzes the impact of pheromone evaporation on flow dynamics across densities.

Findings

Low evaporation rate enhances flux at low densities.

Optimal evaporation rate maximizes flux at high densities.

Intermediate evaporation rate suppresses flux across all densities.

Abstract

Quasi-one-dimensional bidirectional particle flow including the effect of chemotaxis is investigated through a modification of the John-Schadschneider-Chowdhury-Nishinari model. Specifically, we permit multiple lanes to be shared by both directionally traveling particles. The relation between particle density and flux is studied for several evaporation rates of pheromone, and the following results are obtained: i) in the low-particle-density range, the flux is enlarged by pheromone if the pheromone evaporation rate is sufficiently low, ii) in the high particle-density range, the flux is largest at a reasonably high evaporation rate and, iii) if the evaporation rate is at the level intermediate between the above two cases, the flux is kept small in the entire range of particle densities. The mechanism of these behaviors is investigated by observing the spatial-temporal evolution of particles and the average cluster size in the system.