Activity Driven Phase Separation and Ordering Kinetics of Passive Particles

TL;DR

This study investigates how passive particles behave and form structures when mixed with active particles, revealing size and activity-dependent phase separation and slow cluster growth dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation analysis of passive-active particle mixtures, highlighting size and activity effects on phase separation and cluster growth.

Findings

Passive particles form hexagonal clusters at high size ratio and activity.

Cluster growth in passive particles is slower than in active Brownian particles.

Passive particles remain homogeneous at low size ratio and activity.

Abstract

The steady state and phase ordering kinetics in a pure active Borwnian particle system are studied in recent years. In binary mixture of active and passive Brownian particles passive particles are used as probe to understand the properties of active medium. In our present study we study the mixture of passive and active Brownian particles. Here we aim to understand the steady state and kinetics of small passive particles in the mixture. In our system,the passive particles are small in size and large in number, whereas ABPs are large in size and small in number. The system is studied on a two-dimensional substrate using overdamp Langevin dynamic simulation. The steady state and kinetics of passive particles are studied for various size and activity of active particles. Passive particles are purely athermal in nature and have dynamics only due to bigger ABPs. For small size ratio and activity the passive particles remain homogeneous in the system, whereas on increasing size ratio and activity they form periodic hexagonal close pack (HCP) spanning clusters in the system. We have also studied the kinetics of growing passive particle clusters. The mass of the largest cluster shows a much slower growth kinetics in contrast to conserved growth kinetics in ABP system. Our study provides an understanding of steady state and kinetics of passive particles in the presence of bigger active particles. The mixture can be thought of as effect of big microorganism moving in passive medium.