Exact results for active particle models: from long-range interactions to first-passage properties

TL;DR

This thesis provides new exact analytical results for one-dimensional active particle models, exploring their long-range interactions and first-passage properties, revealing phase transitions and activity effects on fluctuations.

Contribution

It extends existing methods to derive exact stationary densities and fluctuation results for active particles with long-range interactions, including Coulomb and Riesz gases, and generalizes Siegmund duality to active systems.

Findings

Exact stationary densities for 1D Coulomb interactions

Identification of non-equilibrium phase transitions

Analysis of activity effects on particle fluctuations

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to obtain new exact results for models of active particles in one dimension, focusing on two different aspects: their behavior in the presence of long-range interactions and their first-passage properties. In the first part we give an overview of existing exact results both for active particle models and for Brownian particles with long-range interactions (Riesz gases). The next two parts focus on how methods from these two fields can be combined and extended to derive new results for models of active particles with long-range interactions. In part two, we study the density of particles in the stationary state, in the limit where the number of particles is very large, using an extension of the Dean-Kawasaki equation to run-and-tumble particles (RTPs). In the case of the 1D Coulomb interaction (attractive or repulsive), we obtain exact expressions for the stationary density for different types of confining potentials, which sheds lights on new non-equilibrium phase-transitions. Some results are also obtained for a repulsive 2D Coulomb interaction (log-gas), although the single-file constraint makes the study more difficult in this case. In part three, we focus on the fluctuations at the tagged particle level. In the limit of weak noise, we compute exactly and analyze in different regimes a variety of correlation functions of the particle positions and interparticle distances, both for the Brownian Riesz gas and for its active counterpart, and show that the activity plays an important role both at short times and at small distances. The last part of this thesis focuses on Siegmund duality, which connects the first-passage properties of a stochastic process with absorbing boundaries to its spatial distribution with hard walls. We extend this duality to a new class of stochastic processes, which includes active particles and diffusing diffusivity models.