Instabilities in a growing system of active particles: scalar and vectorial systems

Abstract

The physics of micron-scale biological colonies usually benefits from different out-of-equilibrium sources. In bacterial colonies and cellular tissues, the growth process is among the important active sources that determine the dynamics. In this article, we study the generic dynamical instabilities associated with the growth phenomena that may arise in both scalar and vectorial systems. In vectorial systems, where the rotational degrees of particles play a role, a phenomenological growth-mediated torque can affect the rotational dynamics of individual particles. We show that such a growth-mediated torque can result in active traveling waves in the bulk of a growing system. In addition to the bulk properties, we analyze the instabilities in the shape of growing interfaces in both scalar and vectorial systems.