Phase separation and multibody effects in three-dimensional active Brownian particles

TL;DR

This study investigates phase separation in three-dimensional active Brownian particles, revealing that multi-body effects and particle caging, rather than pairwise attractions, drive phase behavior in dense regimes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that motility-induced phase separation arises from multi-body effects and caging, not just pairwise interactions, providing new insights into active matter behavior.

Findings

Phase diagram shows motility-induced phase separation and gas-crystal coexistence.

Multi-body effects are key to phase separation, not pairwise attractions.

Information-theoretical measures quantify multi-body interactions.

Abstract

Simulation studies of the phase diagram of repulsive active Brownian particles in three dimensions reveal that the region of motility-induced phase separation between a high and low density phase is enclosed by a region of gas-crystal phase separation. Near-critical loci and structural crossovers can additionally be identified in analogy with simple fluids. Motivated by the striking similarity to the behaviour of equilibrium fluids with short-ranged pair-wise attractions, we show that a direct mapping to pair potentials in the dilute limit implies interactions that are insufficiently attractive to engender phase separation. Instead, this is driven by the emergence of multi-body effects associated with particle caging that occurs at sufficiently high number density. We quantify these effects via information-theoretical measures of $n$-body effective interactions extracted from the configurational structure.