Chemotactic particles as strong electrolytes: Debye-Hückel approximation and effective mobility law

Abstract

We consider a binary mixture of chemically active particles, that produce or consume solute molecules, and that interact with each other through the long-range concentrations fields they generate. We analytically calculate the effective phoretic mobility of these particles when the mixture is submitted to a constant, external concentration gradient, at leading order in the overall concentration. Relying on a analogy with the modeling of strong electrolytes, we show that the effective phoretic mobility decays with the square-root of the concentration: our result is therefore a nonequilibrium counterpart to the celebrated Kohlrausch and Debye-Hückel-Onsager conductivity laws for electrolytes, which are extended here to particles with long-range nonreciprocal interactions. The effective mobility law we derive reveals the existence of a regime of maximal mobility, and could find applications in the description of nanoscale transport phenomena in living cells.