Delayed Active Swimmer in a Velocity Landscape

TL;DR

This paper explores how delayed responses in active particles affect their distribution and movement in varying environments, revealing new control mechanisms for particle transport and organization.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for active particles with delayed speed responses in spatial landscapes, validated by experiments and simulations, highlighting delay as a control parameter.

Findings

Steady-state density and polarization profiles depend on delay time.

Polarization reverses sign when swimming distance exceeds diffusion length.

Delay influences particle organization without external fields.

Abstract

Self-propelled active particles exhibit delayed responses to environmental changes, modulating their propulsion speed through intrinsic sensing and feedback mechanisms. This adaptive behavior fundamentally determines their dynamics and self-organization in active matter systems, with implications for biological microswimmers and engineered microrobots. Here, we investigate active Brownian particles whose propulsion speed is governed by spatially varying activity landscapes, incorporating a temporal delay between environmental sensing and speed adaptation. Through analytical solutions derived for both short-time and long-time delay regimes, we demonstrate that steady-state density and polarization profiles exhibit maxima at characteristic delays. Significantly, we observe that the polarization profile undergoes sign reversal when the swimming distance during the delay time exceeds the characteristic diffusion length, providing a novel mechanism for controlling particle transport without external fields. Our theoretical predictions, validated through experimental observations and numerical simulations, establish time delay as a crucial control parameter for particle transport and organization in active matter systems. These findings provide insights into how biological microorganisms might use response delays to gain navigation advantages and suggest design principles for synthetic microswimmers with programmable responses to heterogeneous environments.