The crumpling transition of active tethered membranes

Abstract

We perform numerical simulations of active ideal and self-avoiding tethered membranes. Passive ideal membranes with bending interactions are known to exhibit a continuous crumpling transition between a low temperature flat phase and a high temperature crumpled phase. Conversely, self-avoiding membranes remain in an extended (flat) phase for all temperatures even in the absence of a bending energy. We find that the introduction of active fluctuations into the system produces a phase behavior that is overall consistent with that observed for passive membranes. The phases and the nature of the transition for ideal membranes is unchanged and active fluctuations can be remarkably accounted for by a simple rescaling of the temperature. For the self-avoiding membrane, we find that the extended phase is preserved even in the presence of very large active fluctuations.