What exactly is 'active matter'?

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the evolving definition of 'active matter' across various physical systems, emphasizing the importance of a clear, coarse-grained understanding to unify diverse phenomena under this concept.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of what constitutes active matter, proposing criteria to distinguish it from other driven systems and clarifying the use of 'active' in theoretical models.

Findings

Active matter encompasses a wide range of systems including biological, chemical, and quantum.

A clear, coarse-grained definition of active matter is essential for consistent understanding.

The term 'active' in models should be carefully distinguished from physical activity in systems.

Abstract

As the study of active matter has developed into one of the most rapidly growing subfields of condensed matter physics, more and more kinds of physical systems have been included in this framework. While the word 'active' is often thought of as referring to self-propelled particles, it is also applied to a large variety of other systems such as non-polar active nematics or certain particles with non-reciprocal interactions. Developing novel forms of active matter, as attempted, e.g., in the framework of quantum active matter, requires a clear idea of what active matter is. Here, we critically discuss how the understanding of active matter has changed over time, what precisely a definition of 'active matter' can look like, and to what extent it is (still) possible to define active matter in a way that covers all systems that are commonly understood as active matter while distinguishing them from other driven systems. Moreover, we discuss the definition of an 'active field theory', where 'active' is used as an attribute of a theoretical model rather than of a physical system. We show that the usage of the term 'active' requires agreement on a coarse-grained viewpoint. We discuss the meaning of 'active' both in general terms and via the specific examples of chemically driven particles, ultrasound-driven particles, active nematics, particles with non-reciprocal interactions, intracellular phase separation, and quantum active matter.