Effective dynamics and fluctuations of a trapped probe moving in a fluid of active hard discs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the motion of a trapped probe in a fluid of active particles, deriving effective dynamics and validating predictions through simulations, revealing good agreement at higher propulsion speeds.

Contribution

It introduces an adiabatic elimination approach to derive effective Markovian dynamics for a large probe in an active particle bath, supported by simulation validation.

Findings

Derived explicit expressions for probe mobility and diffusion coefficient.

Validated theoretical predictions with simulations showing good agreement at high speeds.

Analyzed the impact of active particle propulsion speed on probe fluctuations.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a single trapped probe surrounded by self-propelled active particles in two dimensions. In the limit of large size separation, we perform an adiabatic elimination of the small active particles to obtain an effective Markovian dynamics of the large probe, yielding explicit expressions for the mobility and diffusion coefficient. To calculate these expressions, we perform computer simulations employing active Brownian discs and consider two scenarios: non-interacting bath particles and purely repulsive interactions modeling volume exclusion. We keep the probe-to-bath size ratio fixed and vary the propulsion speed of the bath particles. The positional fluctuations of a trapped probe are accessible in experiments, for which we test the prediction from the adiabatic elimination. Although the approximations cause a discrepancy at equilibrium, the overall agreement between predicted and measured probe fluctuations is very good at larger speeds.