2019/11/11 by Rituparno Mandal, Peter Sollich
Chemistry · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Active matter #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Amorphous solid #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Crystallography #Forcing (mathematics) #Glass transition #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Micro and Nano Robotics #Molecular dynamics #Nanotechnology #Particle (ecology) #Physics #Scaling #Statistical physics #Thermal #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.218001
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 218001 (2020) · 5 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2019/11/11 · openalex publication_date 2020/11/16 · arxiv updated 2020/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Recent experiments and simulations have revealed glassy features in, e.g., cytoplasm, living tissues and dense assemblies of self-propelled colloids. This leads to a fundamental question: how do these nonequilibrium (active) amorphous materials differ from conventional passive glasses, created by lowering temperature or increasing density? To address this we investigate the aging after a quench to an almost arrested state of a model active glass former, a Kob-Andersen glass in two dimensions. Each constituent particle is driven by a constant propulsion force whose direction diffuses over time. Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations we reveal rich aging behavior of this dense active matter system: short persistence times of the active forcing give effective thermal aging; in the opposite limit we find a two-step aging process with active athermal aging at short times and activity-driven aging at late times. We develop a dedicated simulation method that gives access to this longtime scaling regime for highly persistent active forces.