Eur. Phys. J. E (2022) 45: 21
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-022-00174-6

Regular Article - Living Systems

Activity-driven phase separation and ordering kinetics of passive particles

Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), 221005, Varanasi, India

^a shambhavidikshit.rs.phy18@itbhu.ac.in

Received: 9 June 2021
Accepted: 14 February 2022
Published online: 7 March 2022

Abstract

The steady state and phase ordering kinetics in a pure active Brownian particle system are studied in recent years. In binary mixture of active and passive Brownian particles passive particles are used as probe to understand the properties of active medium. In our present study, we study the mixture of passive and active Brownian particles. Here, we aim to understand the steady state and kinetics of small passive particles in the mixture. In our system, the passive particles are small in size and large in number, whereas ABPs are large in size and small in number. The system is studied on a two-dimensional substrate using overdamped Langevin dynamic simulation. The steady state and kinetics of passive particles are studied for various size and activity of active particles. Passive particles are purely athermal in nature and have dynamics only due to bigger ABPs. For small size ratio and activity, the passive particles remain homogeneous in the system, whereas on increasing size ratio and activity they form periodic hexagonal close pack (HCP) spanning clusters in the system. We have also studied the kinetics of growing passive particle clusters. The mass of the largest cluster shows a much slower growth kinetics in contrast to conserved growth kinetics in ABP system. Our study provides an understanding of steady state and kinetics of passive particles in the presence of bigger active particles. The mixture can be thought of as effect of big microorganism moving in passive medium.