Clogging, Dynamics and Reentrant Fluid for Active Matter on Periodic Substrates

TL;DR

This study explores how active matter disks driven over periodic obstacles exhibit various collective states, including clogging, fluidity, and clustering, depending on activity level, driving direction, and obstacle density, revealing complex dynamical behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of active matter on periodic substrates, identifying new clogging regimes, reentrant fluid phases, and the effects of drive direction and obstacle dilution on mobility.

Findings

Low activity yields a clog-free uniform liquid along symmetry directions.

High activity induces heterogeneous, clogged states with reduced mobility.

Reentrant fluid phase occurs at low activity with increasing drive.

Abstract

We examine the collective states of run-and-tumble active matter disks driven over a periodic obstacle array. When the drive is applied along a symmetry direction of the array, we find a clog-free uniform liquid state for low activity, while at higher activity, the density becomes increasingly heterogeneous and an active clogged state emerges in which the mobility is strongly reduced. For driving along non-symmetry or incommensurate directions, there are two different clogging behaviors consisting of a drive dependent clogged state in the low activity thermal limit and a drive independent clogged state at high activity. These regimes are separated by a uniform flowing liquid at intermediate activity. There is a critical activity level above which the thermal clogged state does not occur, as well as an optimal activity level that maximizes the disk mobility. Thermal clogged states are dependent on the driving direction while active clogged states are not. In the low activity regime, diluting the obstacles produces a monotonic increase in the mobility; however, for large activities, the mobility is more robust against obstacle dilution. We also examine the velocity-force curves for driving along non-symmetry directions, and find that they are linear when the activity is low or intermediate, but become nonlinear at high activity and show behavior similar to that found for the plastic depinning of solids. At higher drives the active clustering is lost. For low activity we also find a reentrant fluid phase, where the system transitions from a high mobility fluid at low drives to a clogged state at higher drives and then back into another fluid phase at very high drives. We map the regions in which the thermally clogged, partially clogged, active uniform fluid, clustered fluid, active clogged, and directionally locked states occur as a function of disk density, drift force, and activity.