SKM 2021 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 5: Active Matter (joint session DY/BP/CPP)

BP 5.4: Talk

Thursday, September 30, 2021, 12:30–12:45, H2

Active Cooling in Inertial Active Matter — •Lukas Hecht¹, Suvendu Mandal², Hartmut Löwen², and Benno Liebchen¹ — ¹Institut für Physik kondensierter Materie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hochschulstraße 8, D-64289 Darmstadt, Germany — ²Institut für Theoretische Physik II - Soft Matter, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany

To cool down a target domain of an equilibrium system, the system must be coupled to an external bath to which heat can be transferred. However, active matter is intrinsically out of equilibrium and the active particles themselves do not obey the second law of thermodynamics. Therefore, we ask the question if we can actively cool down active particles in a target domain without transferring a significant amount of heat to particles in the environment.

In this work, we use the active Brownian particle (ABP) model with inertia to develop a route to cool down ABPs in a target domain without the need of an external bath. Such an active cooling requires two ingredients: First, we need the feature of inertial ABPs to undergo motility-induced phase separation into coexisting phases with different effective temperatures [1]. Second, a mechanism that localizes the phase-separated region in the target domain is required. We show several realizations of active cooling demonstrating how inertial effects in active matter can be utilized to actively cool down a target domain.

[1] S. Mandal, B. Liebchen, and H. Löwen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 228001 (2019).