From attraction to repulsion: emergent interactions in harmonically coupled active binary system
Sarkar R, Chatterjee S, Basu U (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2025
Journal
Book Volume: 58
Article Number: 415001
Journal Issue: 41
Abstract
We investigate the emergent interactions between two active Brownian particles coupled by an attractive harmonic potential and in contact with a thermal reservoir. By analysing the stationary distribution of their separation, we demonstrate that the effective interaction can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the interplay between activity, coupling strength, and temperature. Notably, we find that an effective short-range repulsion emerges in the strong and moderate-coupling regimes, when the temperature is below some threshold value, which we characterize analytically. In the strong-coupling regime, the repulsion emerges solely due to the difference in the self-propulsion speeds of the particles. We also compute the short-time position distribution of the centroid of the coupled particles, which shows strongly non-Gaussian fluctuations at low temperatures.
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APA:
Sarkar, R., Chatterjee, S., & Basu, U. (2025). From attraction to repulsion: emergent interactions in harmonically coupled active binary system. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, 58(41). https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8121/ae0900
MLA:
Sarkar, Ritwick, Sreya Chatterjee, and Urna Basu. "From attraction to repulsion: emergent interactions in harmonically coupled active binary system." Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical 58.41 (2025).
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