Spatial velocity correlations in inertial systems of Active Brownian Particles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through simulations and analysis that velocity correlations in Active Brownian Particles are robust to inertia and thermal fluctuations, revealing complex dependencies beyond traditional single-parameter descriptions.

Contribution

It shows that inertial forces and thermal fluctuations influence velocity correlations in ABPs, challenging the sufficiency of the Péclet number as a sole descriptor.

Findings

Velocity domains size remains constant with increasing swim velocity.

Spatial velocity correlation depends on inertia and viscosity, but asymmetrically.

Inertial and active parameters act as independent control variables.

Abstract

Recently, it has been discovered that systems of Active Brownian particles (APB) at high density organise their velocities into coherent domains showing large spatial structures in the velocity field. Such a collective behavior occurs spontaneously, i.e. is not caused by any specific interparticle force favoring the alignment of the velocities. This phenomenon was investigated in the absence of thermal noise and in the overdamped regime where inertial forces could be neglected. In this work, we demonstrate through numerical simulations and theoretical analysis that the velocity alignment is a robust property of ABP and persists even in the presence of inertial forces and thermal fluctuations. We also show that a single dimensionless parameter, such as the P\'eclet number customarily employed in the description of self-propelled particles, is not sufficient to fully characterize such a phenomenon neither in the regimes of large viscosity nor small mass. Indeed, the size of the velocity domains, measured through the correlation length of the spatial velocity correlation, remains constant when the swim velocity increases while decreases as the rotational diffusion becomes larger. We find that the spatial velocity correlation depends on the inertia but, contrary to common belief, are non-symmetrically affected by mass and inverse viscosity variations. We conclude that in self-propelled systems, at variance with passive systems, variations of the inertial time (mass over solvent viscosity) and mass act as independent control parameters. Finally, we highlight the non-thermal nature of the spatial velocity correlations that are fairly insensitive both to solvent and active temperatures.