Using Activity to Compartmentalize Binary Mixtures

Abstract

We computationally study suspensions of slow and fast active Brownian particles that have undergone motility induced phase separation and are at steady state. Such mixtures, of varying non-zero activity, remain largely unexplored even though they are relevant for a plethora of systems and applications ranging from cellular biophysics to drone swarms. Our mixtures are modulated by their activity ratios ($\mathrm{Pe}^\mathrm{R}$), which we find to encode information by giving rise to three regimes, each of which display their unique emergent behaviors. Specifically, we found non-monotonic behavior of macroscopic properties, e.g. density and pressure, as a function of activity ratio, microphase separation of fast and slow particle domains, increased fluctuations on the interface and severe avalanche events compared to monodisperse active systems. Our approach of simultaneously varying the two activities of the particle species allowed us to discover these behaviors and explain the microscopic physical mechanisms that drive them.