Ordered phases in coupled nonequilibrium systems: static properties

TL;DR

This paper investigates how two interacting particle species coupled with a fluctuating landscape can produce various ordered phases, including complete phase separation and coexistence of order and disorder, revealing complex static properties.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled driven system model showing novel static phases with long-range order and phase separation driven by two-way landscape-particle interactions.

Findings

Particles phase separate completely in ordered phases

Landscape can be fully ordered or show coexistence of order and disorder

Different effects of particle species on landscape influence phase behavior

Abstract

We study a coupled driven system in which two species of particles are advected by a fluctuating potential energy landscape. While the particles follow the potential gradient, each species affects the local shape of the landscape in different ways. As a result of this two-way coupling between the landscape and the particles, the system shows interesting new phases, characterized by different sorts of long ranged order in the particles and in the landscape. In all these ordered phases the two particle species phase separate completely from each other, but the underlying landscape may either show complete ordering, with macroscopic regions with distinct average slopes, or may show coexistence of ordered and disordered regions, depending on the differential nature of effect produced by the particle species on the landscape. We discuss several aspects of static properties of these phases in this paper, and we discuss the dynamics of these phases in the sequel.