Nonequilibrium forces following quenches in active and thermal matter
Name
PhysRevE.97.032125.pdf
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4.16 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Rohwer, Christian M.
Solon, Alexandre
Kardar, Mehran
Krüger, Matthias
Date Issued
March 2018
Journal
Physical Review E
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Rohwer, Christian M. et al. "Nonequilibrium forces following quenches in active and thermal matter." Physical Review E 97, 3 (March 2018): 032125 © 2018 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Nonequilibrium systems with conserved quantities like density or momentum are known to exhibit long-ranged correlations. This, in turn, leads to long-ranged fluctuation-induced (Casimir) forces, predicted to arise in a variety of nonequilibrium settings. Here, we study such forces, which arise transiently between parallel plates or compact inclusions in a gas of particles, following a change (“quench”) in temperature or activity of the medium. Analytical calculations, as well as numerical simulations of passive or active Brownian particles, indicate two distinct forces: (i) The immediate effect of the quench is adsorption or desorption of particles of the medium to the immersed objects, which in turn initiates a front of relaxing (mean) density. This leads to time-dependent density-induced forces. (ii) A long-term effect of the quench is that density fluctuations are modified, manifested as transient (long-ranged) (pair-)correlations that relax diffusively to their (short-ranged) steady-state limit. As a result, transient fluctuation-induced forces emerge. We discuss the properties of fluctuation-induced and density-induced forces as regards universality, relaxation as a function of time, and scaling with distance between objects. Their distinct signatures allow us to distinguish the two types of forces in simulation data. Our simulations also show that a quench of the effective temperature of an active medium gives rise to qualitatively similar effects to a temperature quench in a passive medium. Based on this insight, we propose several scenarios for the experimental observation of the forces described here.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.97.032125
