Collective dynamics of active dumbbells near a circular obstacle

Abstract

In this article, we present the collective dynamics of active dumbbells in the presence of a static circular obstacle using Brownian dynamics simulation. The active dumbbells aggregate on the surface of a circular obstacle beyond a critical radius. The aggregation is non-uniform along the circumference, and the aggregate size increases with the activity (Pe) and the curvature radius (R_o). The dense aggregate of active dumbbells displays persistent rotational motion with a certain angular speed, which linearly increases with activity. Furthermore, we show a strong polar ordering of the active dumbbells within the aggregate. The polar ordering exhibits long-range correlation, with the correlation length corresponding to the aggregate size. Additionally, we show that the residence time of an active dumbbell on the obstacle surface increases rapidly with area fraction due to many-body interactions that lead to a slowdown of the rotational diffusion. This article further considers the dynamical behavior of a tracer particle in the solution of active dumbbells. Interestingly, the speed of the passive tracer particle displays a crossover from monotonically decreasing to increasing with the size of the tracer particle upon increasing the dumbbells' speed. Furthermore, the effective diffusion of the tracer particle displays non-monotonic behavior with the area fraction; the initial increase in diffusivity is followed by a decrease for a larger area fraction.