Shaping active matter from crystalline solids to active turbulence

Abstract

Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of active materials with minimal control remains a desirable yet challenging goal. Here, we employ large-scale, agent-resolved simulations to demonstrate that modulating the activity of a wet phoretic medium alone can govern its solid-liquid-gas phase transitions and, subsequently, laminar-turbulent transitions in fluid phases, thereby shaping its emergent pattern. These two progressively emerging transitions, hitherto unreported, bring us closer to perceiving the parallels between active matter and traditional matter. Our work reproduces and reconciles seemingly conflicting experimental observations on chemically active systems, presenting a unified landscape of phoretic collective dynamics. These findings enhance the understanding of long-range, many-body interactions among phoretic agents, offer new insights into their non-equilibrium collective behaviors, and provide potential guidelines for designing reconfigurable materials.

Earlier research has shown that controlling activity in the active matter can lead to either a phase change or a laminar-turbulent transition in active fluids. Authors demonstrate that it is possible to control both the phase transitions between solid, liquid, and gas states and the laminar-to-turbulent transitions in fluid phases by adjusting the activity of a phoretic medium.