Effective single component description of steady state structures of passive particles in an active bath.

Abstract

We model a binary mixture of passive and active Brownian particles in two dimensions using the effective interaction between passive particles in the active bath. The activity of active particles and the size ratio of two types of particles are the two control parameters in the system. The effective interaction is calculated from the average force on two particles generated by the active particles. The effective interaction can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the system parameters. The passive particles form four distinct structural orders for different system parameters, viz., homogeneous structures, disordered cluster, ordered cluster, and crystalline structure. The change in structure is dictated by the change in nature of the effective interaction. We further confirm the four structures using a full microscopic simulation of active and passive mixture. Our study is useful to understand the different collective behavior in non-equilibrium systems.