Analogies between growing dense active matter and soft driven glasses

Tjhung, Elsen; Berthier, Ludovic

Abstract

We develop a minimal model to describe growing dense active matter such as biological tissues, bacterial colonies, and biofilms, which are driven by a competition between particle division and steric repulsion. We provide a detailed numerical analysis of collective and single-particle dynamics. We show that the microscopic dynamics can be understood as the superposition of an affine radial component due to the global growth, and of a more complex nonaffine component that displays features typical of driven soft glassy materials, such as aging, compressed exponential decay of time correlation functions, and a crossover from superdiffusive behavior at short scales to subdiffusive behavior at larger scales. This analogy emerges because particle division at the microscale leads to a global expansion, which then plays a role analogous to shear flow in soft driven glasses. We conclude that growing dense active matter and sheared dense suspensions can generically be described by the same underlying physics.

Citation

Tjhung, E., & Berthier, L. (2020). Analogies between growing dense active matter and soft driven glasses. Physical Review Research, 2(4), Article 043334. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevresearch.2.043334

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 19, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Dec 7, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 14, 2021
• Journal: Physical Review Research
• Electronic ISSN: 2643-1564
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 4
• Article Number: 043334
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevresearch.2.043334
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1250659