Abstract
We revisit motility-induced phase separation in two models of active particles interacting by pairwise repulsion and uncover new qualitative features: the resulting dense phase contains gas bubbles distributed algebraically up to a typically extremely large cutoff scale. At large enough system size and/or global density, all the gas may be contained inside the bubbles, at which point the system is microphase separated with a finite cutoff bubble scale. We further observe that the ordering is clearly anomalous, with different dynamics for the coarsening of the dense phase and of the gas bubbles. This self-organized critical phenomenology is reproduced by a “reduced bubble model” that implements the basic idea of reverse Ostwald ripening put forward in Tjhung et al. [Phys. Rev. X 8, 031080 (2018)].
- Received 14 July 2020
- Accepted 18 September 2020
- Corrected 25 January 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.168001
© 2020 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
25 January 2021
Correction: The omission of a support statement in the Acknowledgments section has been fixed.