Enhanced Phonon Peak in Four-point Dynamic Susceptibility in the Supercooled Active Glass-forming Liquids

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the four-point dynamic susceptibility at the phonon timescale increases with activity in supercooled active glass-forming liquids, providing a potential quantitative measure of activity and revealing an intrinsic dynamic length scale.

Contribution

The paper introduces a method to quantify activity in active glassy systems using the growth of four-point susceptibility at the phonon timescale, highlighting a size-dependent peak and a universal relation with activity.

Findings

Peak height of $_4(t)$ grows with activity.

Finite size analysis shows a size-dependent increase in susceptibility.

Peak height correlates with effective activity across system sizes.

Abstract

Active glassy systems can be thought of as simple model systems that imitate complex biological systems. Sometimes, it becomes crucial to estimate the amount of the activity present in such biological systems, such as predicting the progression rate of the cancer cells or the healing time of the wound. In this work, we study a model active glassy system to understand a possible quantification of the degree of activity from the collective, long-range phonon response in the system. We find that the four-point dynamic susceptibility, $\chi_4(t)$ at the phonon timescale, grows with increased activity. We then show how one can estimate the degree of the activity at such a small timescale by measuring the growth of $\chi_4(t)$ with changing activity. A detailed finite size analysis of this measurement, shows that the peak height of $\chi_4(t)$ at this phonon timescale increases strongly with increasing system size suggesting a possible existence of an intrinsic dynamic length scale that grows with increasing activity. Finally, we show that this peak height is a unique function of effective activity across all system sizes, serving as a possible parameter for characterizing the degree of activity in a system.