Active Phase Separation in Mixtures of Chemically Interacting Particles

Jaime Agudo-Canalejo; Ramin Golestanian

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.018101

Active Phase Separation in Mixtures of Chemically Interacting Particles

Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Jul 3;123(1):018101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.018101.

Authors

Jaime Agudo-Canalejo^{1

2}, Ramin Golestanian^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PU, United Kingdom.
² Department of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
³ Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), D-37077 Göttingen, Germany.

PMID: 31386420
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.018101

Abstract

We theoretically study mixtures of chemically interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase separation phenomena in which the nonequilibrium chemical interactions between particles, which break action-reaction symmetry, can lead to separation into phases with distinct density and stoichiometry. Because of the generic nature of our minimal model, our results shed light on the underlying fundamental principles behind nonequilibrium self-organization of cells and bacteria, catalytic enzymes, or phoretic colloids.