The Mechanics and Statistics of Active Matter

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Abstract

Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular motors. This article reviews recent progress in applying the principles of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics to form a systematic theory of the behaviour of collections of active particles -- active matter -- with only minimal regard to microscopic details. A unified view of the many kinds of active matter is presented, encompassing not only living systems but inanimate analogues. Theory and experiment are discussed side by side.

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Rémi Dreyfus, Jean Baudry, Marcus L. Roper … (2005)

Microorganisms such as bacteria and many eukaryotic cells propel themselves with hair-like structures known as flagella, which can exhibit a variety of structures and movement patterns. For example, bacterial flagella are helically shaped and driven at their bases by a reversible rotary engine, which rotates the attached flagellum to give a motion similar to that of a corkscrew. In contrast, eukaryotic cells use flagella that resemble elastic rods and exhibit a beating motion: internally generated stresses give rise to a series of bends that propagate towards the tip. In contrast to this variety of swimming strategies encountered in nature, a controlled swimming motion of artificial micrometre-sized structures has not yet been realized. Here we show that a linear chain of colloidal magnetic particles linked by DNA and attached to a red blood cell can act as a flexible artificial flagellum. The filament aligns with an external uniform magnetic field and is readily actuated by oscillating a transverse field. We find that the actuation induces a beating pattern that propels the structure, and that the external fields can be adjusted to control the velocity and the direction of motion.

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Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles

Andras Czirok, Ofer Sochet, Tamás Vicsek … (2006)

A simple model with a novel type of dynamics is introduced in order to investigate the emergence of self-ordered motion in systems of particles with biologically motivated interaction. In our model particles are driven with a constant absolute velocity and at each time step assume the average direction of motion of the particles in their neighborhood with some random perturbation (\(\eta\)) added. We present numerical evidence that this model results in a kinetic phase transition from no transport (zero average velocity, \(| {\bf v}_a | =0\)) to finite net transport through spontaneous symmetry breaking of the rotational symmetry. The transition is continuous since \(| {\bf v}_a |\) is found to scale as \((\eta_c-\eta)^\beta\) with \(\beta\simeq 0.45\).

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Existence of Long-Range Order in One and Two Dimensions

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Author and article information

Journal

Publication date Created: 12 April 2010

Article

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-070909-104101

ArXiV ID: 1004.1933

SO-VID: 77a1c4a6-03d1-4a56-b235-47b785e8d181

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http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

History

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Comments This review is to appear in volume 1 of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics in July 2010 and is posted here with permission from that journal

Categories cond-mat.soft cond-mat.stat-mech physics.bio-ph

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