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Systems driven far from equilibrium may exhibit anomalous density fluctuations: active matter with orientational order display giant density fluctuations at large scale, while systems of interacting particles close to an absorbing phase transition may exhibit hyperuniformity, suppressing large-scale density fluctuations. We show that these seemingly incompatible phenomena can coexist in nematically ordered active systems, provided activity is conditioned to particle contacts. We characterize this unusual state of matter and unravel the underlying mechanisms simultaneously leading to spatially enhanced (on large length scales) and suppressed (on intermediate length scales) density fluctuations. Our work highlights the potential for a rich phenomenology in active matter systems in which particles' activity is triggered by their local environment, and calls for a more systematic exploration of absorbing phase transitions in orientationally-ordered particle systems.

Close to the yielding transition, amorphous solids exhibit a jerky dynamics characterized by plastic avalanches. The statistics of these avalanches have been measured experimentally and numerically using a variety of different triggering protocols, assuming that all of them were equivalent for this purpose. In particular two main classes of protocols have been studied, deformation under controlled strain or under controlled stress. In this work, we investigate different protocols to generate plasticity avalanches and conduct twodimensional simulations of an elastoplastic model to examine the protocol dependence of avalanche statistics in yield-stress fluids. We demonstrate that when stress is controlled, the value and even the existence of the exponent governing the probability distribution function of avalanche sizes strongly depend on the protocol chosen to initiate avalanches. This confirms in finite dimensions a scenario presented in a previous mean-field analysis. We identify a consistent stress-controlled protocol whose associated avalanches differ from the quasi-static ones in their fractal dimension and dynamical exponent. Remarkably, this protocol also seems to verify the scaling relations among exponents previously proposed. Our results underscores the necessity for a cautious interpretation of avalanche universality within elastoplastic models, and more generally within systems where several control parameters exist.

We introduce a minimal model of energy transfer through scales to describe, at a qualitative level, the subcritical transition between laminar and turbulent flows, viewed in a statistical physics framework as a discontinuous absorbing phase transition. The main control parameter of the model is a Reynolds number that compares energy transfer to viscous dissipation on a large length scale. In spite of its simplicity, the model qualitatively reproduces a number of salient features of the subcritical laminar-turbulent transition, including the existence of an absorbing laminar state, the discontinuous onset of a metastable fluctuating turbulent state above a threshold Reynolds number, and a faster-than-exponential increase of the turbulence lifetime when increasing the Reynolds number. The behavior of the model is also consistent, at high Reynolds number, with the Kolmogorov K41 phenomenology of fully developed turbulence., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures. Two movies provided as Ancillary Files

We study the effect of introducing separable quenched disorder on a non-equilibrium mean-field spin model exhibiting a phase transition to an oscillating state in the absence of disorder, due to non-reciprocal interactions. In the disordered model, the magnetisation and its time derivative no longer carry the signature of the phase transition to an oscillating state. However, thanks to the separable (Mattis-type) form of the disorder, the presence of oscillations can be revealed by introducing a specific, disorder-dependent observable. We also introduce generalised linear and non-linear susceptibilities associated either with the magnetisation or with its time derivative. While linear susceptibilities show no sign of a phase transition, the third-order susceptibilities present a clear signature of the onset of an oscillating phase. In addition, we show that the overlap distribution also provides evidence for the presence of oscillations, without explicit knowledge of the disorder.

We study the onset of collective oscillations at low temperature in a three-dimensional spin model with non-reciprocal short-range interactions. Performing numerical simulations of the model, the presence of a continuous phase transition to global oscillations is confirmed by a finite-size scaling analysis. By systematically varying the interaction range, we show that collective oscillations in this spin model actually result from two successive phase transitions: a mean-field phase transition over finite-size neighborhoods, which leads to the emergence of local noisy oscillators, and a synchronization transition of local noisy oscillators, which generates coherent macroscopic oscillations. Using a Fokker-Planck equation under a local mean-field approximation, we derive from the spin dynamics coupled Langevin equations for the complex amplitudes describing noisy oscillations on a mesoscopic scale. The phase diagram of these coupled equations is qualitatively obtained from a fully-connected (mean-field) approximation. This analytical approach allows us to clearly disentangle the onset of local and global oscillations, and to identify the two main control parameters, expressed as combinations of the microscopic parameters of the spin dynamics, that control the phase diagram of the model.

Systems with a complex dynamics like glasses or models of biological evolution are often pictured in terms of complex landscapes, with a large number of possible collective states. We show on the example of a stochastic spin model with non-reciprocal and heterogeneous interactions how the complex landscape notion can be generalized far from equilibrium, where collective states may exhibit spontaneous oscillations, often hidden by the presence of disorder. We identify relevant observables, like the density of entropy production, to unveil the presence of oscillations, and we characterize the complex landscape of our model in terms of a configurational entropy, that counts the number of nonequilibrium collective states with a given entropy production density.

In open water, social fish gather to form schools, in which fish generally align with each other. In this work, we study how this social behavior evolves when perturbed by artificial obstacles. We measure the collective behavior of a group of zebrafish in the presence of a periodic array of pillars. When pillar density is low, the fish regroup with a typical inter-distance and a well-polarized state with parallel orientations, similar to their behavior in open water conditions. Above a critical density of pillars, their social interactions, which are mostly based on vision, are screened and the fish spread randomly through the aquarium, orienting themselves along the free axes of the pillar lattice. The abrupt transition from natural to artificial orientation happens when the pillar inter-distance is comparable to the social distance of the fish, i.e., their most probable inter-distance. We develop a stochastic model of the relative orientation between fish pairs, taking into account alignment, anti-alignment and tumbling, from a distribution biased by the environment. This model provides a good description of the experimental probability distribution of the relative orientation between the fish and captures the behavioral transition. Using the model to fit the experimental data provides qualitative information on the evolution of cognitive parameters, such as the alignment or the tumbling rates, as the pillar density increases. At high pillar density, we find that the artificial environment imposes its geometrical constraints to the fish school, drastically increasing the tumbling rate., Comment: 9 figures in main text, 5 figures in appendix

The yielding transition in athermal complex fluids can be interpreted as an absorbing phase transition between an elastic, absorbing state with high mesoscopic degeneracy and a flowing, active state. We characterize quantitatively this phase transition in an elastoplastic model under fixed applied shear stress, using a finite-size scaling analysis. We find vanishing critical fluctuations of the order parameter (i.e., the shear rate), and relate this property to the convex character of the phase transition ($\beta >1$). We show explicitly that the CDP class is recovered when both properties are relaxed. We locate yielding within a family of models akin to fixed-energy sandpile (FES) models, only with long-range redistribution kernels with zero-modes that result from mechanical equilibrium. For redistribution kernels with sufficiently fast decay, this family of models belong to a short-range universality class distinct from the Conserved Directed Percolation class of usual FES, which is induced by zero modes., Comment: 4 pages + Supplementary material

We propose a one-dimensional model of active particles interpolating between quorum sensing models used in the study of motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) and models of congestion of traffic flow on a single-lane highway. Particles have a target velocity with a density-dependent magnitude and a direction that flips with a finite rate that is biased toward moving right. Two key parameters are the bias and the speed relaxation time. MIPS is known to occur in such models at zero bias and zero relaxation time (overdamped dynamics), while a fully biased motion with no velocity reversal models traffic flow on a highway. Using both numerical simulations and continuum equations derived from the microscopic dynamics, we show that a single phase-separated state extends from the usual MIPS to congested traffic flow in the phase diagram defined by the bias and the speed relaxation time. However, in the fully biased case, inertia is essential to observe phase separation, making MIPS and congested traffic flow seemingly different phenomena if not simultaneously considering inertia and tumbling. We characterize the velocity of the dense phase, which is static for usual MIPS and moves backwards in traffic congestion. We also find that in presence of bias, the phase diagram becomes richer, with an additional transition between phase separation and a microphase separation that is seen above a threshold bias or relaxation rate., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 1 movie

In a statistical physics context, inverse problems consist in determining microscopic interactions such that a system reaches a predefined collective state. A complex collective state may be prescribed by specifying the overlap distribution between microscopic configurations, a notion originally introduced in the context of disordered systems like spin-glasses. We show that in spite of the absence of disorder, nonequilibrium spin models exhibiting spontaneous magnetization oscillations provide a benchmark to prescribe a non-trivial overlap distribution with continuous support, qualitatively analogous to the ones found in disordered systems with full replica symmetry breaking. The overlap distribution can be explicitly tailored to take a broad range of predefined shapes by monitoring the spin dynamics. The presence of a non-trivial overlap distribution is traced back to an average over infinitely many pure states, a feature shared with spin-glasses, although the structure of pure states is here much simpler.

Experimental measurements of nonlinear dielectric response in glassformers like supercooled glycerol or propylene carbonate have been interpreted as providing evidence for a growing thermodynamic length scale when lowering temperature. A heuristic picture based on coherently flipping `superdipoles' with disordered internal structure has been argued to capture the essence of the experimentally reported behavior, pointing to the key role of effectively disordered interactions in structural glasses. We test these ideas by devising an explicit one-dimensional model of interacting spins incorporating both the spin-glass spirit of the superdipole argument, and the necessary long-time decorrelation of structural disorder, encoded here in a slow dynamics of the coupling constants. The frequency-dependent third-order response of the model qualitatively reproduces the typical humped shape reported in experiments. The temperature dependence of the maximum value is also qualitatively reproduced. In contrast, the humped shape of the third-order response is not reproduced by a simple kinetically constrained spin model with non-interacting spins. To rationalize these results, we propose a two-length-scale scenario by distinguishing between the characteristic length of dynamical heterogeneities and a coherence length that monitors the effect of interactions. We show that both length scales are identical in the kinetically constrained spin model, while they have significantly different dynamics in the model of interacting spins., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures

We study a nonequilibrium ferromagnetic mean-field spin model exhibiting a phase with spontaneous temporal oscillations of the magnetization, on top of the usual paramagnetic and ferromagnetic phases. This behavior is obtained by introducing dynamic field variables coupled to the spins through non-reciprocal couplings. We determine a nonequilibrium generalization of the Landau free energy in terms of the large deviation function of the magnetization and of an appropriately defined smoothed stochastic time derivative of the magnetization. While the transition between paramagnetic and oscillating phase is continuous, the transition between ferromagnetic and oscillating phases is found to be discontinuous, with a coexistence of both phases, one being stable and the other one metastable. Depending on parameter values, the ferromagnetic points may either be inside or outside the limit cycle, leading to different transition scenarios. The stability of these steady states is determined from the large deviation function. We also show that in the coexistence region, the entropy production has a pronounced maximum as a function of system size.

We propose a mean-field theory for nonequilibrium phase transitions to a periodically oscillating state in spin models. A nonequilibrium generalization of the Landau free energy is obtained from the join distribution of the magnetization and its smoothed stochastic time derivative. The order parameter of the transition is a Hamiltonian, whose nonzero value signals the onset of oscillations. The Hamiltonian and the nonequilibrium Landau free energy are determined explicitly from the stochastic spin dynamics. The oscillating phase is also characterized by a non-trivial overlap distribution reminiscent of a continuous replica symmetry breaking, in spite of the absence of disorder. An illustration is given on an explicit kinetic mean-field spin model., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

We consider the problem of diffusion with stochastic resetting in a population of random walks where the diffusion coefficient is not constant, but behaves as a power-law of the average resetting rate of the population. Resetting occurs only beyond a threshold distance from the origin. This problem is motivated by physical realizations like soft matter under shear, where diffusion of a walk is induced by resetting events of other walks. We first reformulate in the broader context of diffusion with stochastic resetting the so-called H\'ebraud-Lequeux model for plasticity in dense soft matter, in which diffusivity is proportional to the average resetting rate. Depending on parameter values, the response to a weak external field may be either linear or non-linear with a non-zero average position for a vanishing applied field, and the transition between these two regimes may be interpreted as a continuous phase transition. Extending the model by considering a general power-law relation between diffusivity and average resetting rate, we notably find a discontinuous phase transition between a finite diffusivity and a vanishing diffusivity in the small field limit., Comment: 12 pages, submitted to special issue of J. Phys. A on "Stochastic Resetting: Theory and Applications"

Granular matter like sand is composed of a large number of interacting grains, and is thus expected to be amenable to a statistical physics treatment. Yet, the frictional properties of grains make the statistical physics of granular matter significantly different from the equilibrium statistical physics of atomic or molecular systems. We illustrate here on simple models some of the key concepts of the statistical physics introduced by Edwards and coworkers more than thirty years ago to describe shaken granular piles. Quite surprisingly, properties of such frictional systems observed at high effective temperature (i.e., strong shaking) may share some analogies with some low temperature properties of equilibrium systems. For instance, the effective specific heat of non-interacting frictional grains under strong shaking in a harmonic potential goes to zero in the high temperature limit. As a second example, a chain of frictional grains linked by springs exhibits a critical point at infinite effective temperature, at odds with the zero-temperature critical point generically found in one-dimensional equilibrium systems in the presence of local interactions., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, pedagogical paper

We explore the rheology predicted by a recently proposed constitutive model for jammed suspensions of soft elastic particles derived from particle-level dynamics [Cuny et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 218003 (2021)]. Our model predicts that the orientation of the anisotropy of the microstructure, governed by an interplay between advection and contact elasticity, plays a key role at yielding and in flow. It generates normal stress differences contributing significantly to the yield criterion and Trouton ratio. It gives rise to non-trivial transients such as stress overshoots in step increases of shear rate, residual stresses after flow cessation and power-law decay of the shear rate in creep. Finally, it explains the collapse of storage modulus as measured in parallel superposition for a yielded suspension., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figs

Experiments of periodically sheared colloidal suspensions or soft amorphous solids display a transition from reversible to irreversible particle motion that, when analysed stroboscopically in time, is interpreted as an absorbing phase transition with infinitely many absorbing states. In these systems interactions mediated by hydrodynamics or elasticity are present, causing passive regions to be affected by nearby active ones. We show that mediated interactions induce a new universality class of absorbing phase transitions, distinct from Conserved Directed Percolation, and we obtain the corresponding critical exponents. We do so with large-scale numerical simulations of a minimal model for the stroboscopic dynamics of sheared soft materials and derive the minimal field theoretical description., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

We develop a constitutive model allowing for the description of the rheology of two-dimensional soft dense suspensions above jamming. Starting from a statistical description of the particle dynamics, we derive, using a set of approximations, a non-linear tensorial evolution equation linking the deviatoric part of the stress tensor to the strain-rate and vorticity tensors. The coefficients appearing in this equation can be expressed in terms of the packing fraction and of particle-level parameters. This constitutive equation rooted in the microscopic dynamic qualitatively reproduces a number of salient features of the rheology of jammed soft suspensions, including the presence of yield stresses for the shear component of the stress and for the normal stress difference. More complex protocols like the relaxation after a preshear are also considered, showing a smaller stress after relaxation for a stronger preshear., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

Considering the rheology of two-dimensional soft suspensions above the jamming density, we derive a tensorial constitutive model from the microscopic particle dynamics. Starting from the equation governing the $N$-particle distribution, we derive an evolution equation for the stress tensor. This evolution equation is not closed, as it involves the pair and three-particle correlation functions. To close this equation, we first employ the standard Kirkwood closure relation to express the three-particle correlation function in terms of the pair correlation function. Then we use a simple and physically motivated parametrization of the pair correlation function to obtain a closed evolution equation for the stress tensor. The latter is naturally expressed as separate evolution equations for the pressure and for the deviatoric part of the stress tensor. These evolution equations provide us with a non-linear tensorial constitutive model describing the rheological response of a jammed soft suspension to an arbitrary uniform deformation. One of the advantages of this microscopically-rooted description is that the coefficients appearing in the constitutive model are known in terms of packing fraction and microscopic parameters., Comment: 31 pages, 7 figures Final Version after review

Considering the large deviations of activity and current in the Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (ASEP), we show that there exists a non-trivial correspondence between the joint scaled cumulant generating functions of activity and current of two ASEPs with different parameters. This mapping is obtained by applying a similarity transform on the deformed Markov matrix of the source model in order to obtain the deformed Markov matrix of the target model. We first derive this correspondence for periodic boundary conditions, and show in the diffusive scaling limit (corresponding to the Weakly Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Processes, or WASEP) how the mapping is expressed in the language of Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (MFT). As an interesting specific case, we map the large deviations of current in the ASEP to the large deviations of activity in the SSEP, thereby uncovering a regime of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang in the distribution of activity in the SSEP. At large activity, particle configurations exhibit hyperuniformity [Jack et al., PRL 114 060601 (2015)]. Using results from quantum spin chain theory, we characterize the hyperuniform regime by evaluating the small wavenumber asymptotic behavior of the structure factor at half-filling. Conversely, we formulate from the MFT results a conjecture for a correlation function in spin chains at any fixed total magnetization (in the thermodynamic limit). In addition, we generalize the mapping to the case of two open ASEPs with boundary reservoirs, and we apply it in the WASEP limit in the MFT formalism. This mapping also allows us to find a symmetry-breaking dynamical phase transition (DPT) in the WASEP conditioned by activity, from the prior knowledge of a DPT in the WASEP conditioned by the current., Comment: 30 pages. Updated references, conclusion

We introduce a nonequilibrium grand-canonical ensemble defined by considering the stationary state of a driven system of particles put in contact with a nonequilibrium particle reservoir. At odds with its equilibrium counterpart, or with purely formal constructions of a grand-canonical ensemble, this physically-motivated construction yields a grand-canonical distribution that depends on the details of the contact dynamics between the system and the reservoir. For non-interacting driven particles, a grand-canonical chemical potential can still be defined, although this chemical potential now differs from that of the reservoir. However, in the general case, the usual exponential factor (in the particle number) defining the grand-canonical chemical potential, is replaced by the exponential of a non-linear function of the density, this function being proportional to the volume. This case is illustrated explicitly on a one-dimensional lattice model. Although a grand-canonical chemical potential can no longer be defined in this case, it is possible for a subclass of contact dynamics to generalize the equilibrium fluctuation-response relation by introducing a small external potential difference between the system and the reservoir., Comment: 8 pages

Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities having a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics may emerge from potentially much more complex agents is thus a natural question. It has been proposed recently in [E. Bertin, P. Jensen, C.R. Phys. 20, 329 (2019)] that some types of interactions among agents with many internal degrees of freedom may lead to a `simplification' of agents, which are then effectively described by a small number of internal degrees of freedom. Here, we generalize the model to account for agents intrinsic heterogeneity. We find two different simplification regimes, one dominated by interactions, where agents become simple and identical as in the homogeneous model, and one where agents remain strongly heterogeneous although effectively having simple characteristics., Comment: Submitted to the special issue of Symmetry "30 years of Econophysics: Symmetry in Physics and Economics"

We consider a particle with a Langevin dynamics driven by a uniform non-conservative force, in a one-dimensional potential with periodic boundary conditions. We are interested in the properties of the system for atypical values of the time-integral of a generalized particle current. To study these, we bias the dynamics, at trajectory level, by a parameter conjugated to the current, within the large-deviation formalism. We investigate, in the weak-noise limit, the phase diagram spanned by the physical driving force and the parameter defining the biased process. We focus in particular on the depinning transition in this two-dimensional phase diagram. In the absence of trajectory bias, the depinning transition as a function of the force is characterized by the standard exponent $\frac{1}{2}$. We show that for any non-zero bias, the depinning transition is characterized by an inverse logarithmic behavior as a function of either the bias or the force, close to the critical lines. We also report a scaling exponent $\frac{1}{3}$ for the current when considering the depinning transition in terms of the bias, fixing the non-conservative force to its critical value in the absence of bias. Then, focusing on the time-integrated particle current, we study the thermal rounding effects in the zero-current phase when the tilted potential exhibits a local minimum. We derive in this case the Arrhenius scaling, in the small noise limit, of both the particle current and the scaled cumulant generating function. This derivation of the Arrhenius scaling relies on the determination of the left eigenvector of the biased Fokker-Planck operator, to exponential order in the low-noise limit. An effective Poissonian statistics of the integrated current emerges in this limit., Comment: 44 pages, 9 figures

We study the effect of inhomogeneous environments on the swimming direction of the microalgae \textit{Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii} (CR) in the presence of a light stimulus. Positive or negative phototaxis describe the ability of microorganisms to bias their swimming towards or away from a light source. Here we consider microswimmers with negative phototaxis in a microfluidic device with a microfabricated square lattice of pillars as obstacles. We measured a mean deflection of microswimmers that shows an interesting nonlinear dependence on the direction of the guiding light beam with respect to the symmetry axes of the pillar lattice. By simulating a model swimmer in a pillar lattice and analyzing its scattering behavior, we identified the width of the reorientation distribution of swimmers to be also crucial for the nonlinear behavior of the swimmer deflection. On the basis of these results we suggest in addition an analytical model for microswimmers, where the pillar lattice is replaced by an anisotropic scattering medium, that depends only on a scattering rate and the width of the reorientation distribution of swimmers. This flexible and handy model fits the experimental results as well. The presented analysis of the deflection of light guided swimmers through pillar lattice may be used for separating swimmers having different reorientation distributions.

We investigate the non-equilibrium large deviations function of the particle densities in two steady-state driven systems exchanging particles at a vanishing rate. We first derive through a systematic multi-scale analysis the coarse-grained master equation satisfied by the distribution of the numbers of particles in each system. Assuming that this distribution takes for large systems a large deviations form, we obtain the equation (similar to a Hamilton-Jacobi equation) satisfied by the large deviations function of the densities. Depending on the systems considered, this equation may satisfy or not the macroscopic detailed balance property, i.e., a time-reversibility property at large deviations level. In the absence of macroscopic detailed balance, the large deviations function can be determined as an expansion close to a solution satisfying macroscopic detailed balance. In this case, the large deviations function is generically non-additive, i.e., it cannot be split as two separate contributions from each system. In addition, the large deviations function can be interpreted as a non-equilibrium free energy, as it satisfies a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics, in the spirit of the Hatano-Sasa relation. Some of the results are illustrated on an exactly solvable driven lattice gas model., Comment: 31 pages, 1 figure

In this work we study the rheological features of yield stress materials that exhibit non-homogeneous steady flows and that are subjected to an additional mechanical noise. Using a mesoscale elasto-plastic model accounting for a viscosity bifurcation in the flow response to an external shear stress, we find that additional sources of noise can lead to a fluidisation effect. As we increase the noise intensity we evidence a transition from a non-monotonic to a monotonic rheology, associated with giant fluctuations of the macroscopic shear rate and long-time correlated dynamics. Although distinct noise models can lead to different rheological behaviours in the low stress regime, we show that the noise-induced transition from shear-localised to homogeneous flow at higher stresses appears very generic. The observed features in the dynamics can be interpreted as a result of an out-of-equilibrium phase transition, for which we estimate the critical exponents that appear to be independent of the specific choice of the noise implementation for the microscopic dynamics., Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures

We introduce a general framework to describe the stationary state of two driven systems exchanging particles or mass through a contact, in a slow exchange limit. The definition of chemical potentials for the systems in contact requires that the large-deviations function describing the repartition of mass between the two systems is additive, in the sense of being a sum of contributions from each system. We show that this additivity property is satisfied on condition that a macroscopic detailed balance condition holds at contact, and that the coarse-grained contact dynamics satisfies a factorization property. However, the nonequilibrium chemical potentials of the systems in contact keep track of the contact dynamics, and thus do not obey an equation of state. These nonequilibrium chemical potentials can be related either to the equilibrium chemical potential, or to the nonequilibrium chemical potential of the isolated systems. Results are applied both to an exactly solvable driven lattice gas model, and to the Katz-Lebowitz-Spohn model using a numerical procedure to evaluate the chemical potential., Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures

We study dry, dense active nematics at both particle and continuous levels. Specifically, extending the Boltzmann-Ginzburg-Landau approach, we derive well-behaved hydrodynamic equations from a Vicsek-style model with nematic alignment and pairwise repulsion. An extensive study of the phase diagram shows qualitative agreement between the two levels of description. We find in particular that the dynamics of topological defects strongly depends on parameters and can lead to ``arch'' solutions forming a globally polar, smectic arrangement of N\'eel walls. We show how these configurations are at the origin of the defect ordered states reported previously. This work offers a detailed understanding of the theoretical description of dense active nematics directly rooted in their microscopic dynamics.

We study the emergence of critical dynamics in the steady shear rheology of fluidized soft glassy materials. Within a mesoscale elasto-plastic model accounting for a shear band instability, we show how an additional noise can induce a transition from phase separated to homogeneous flow, accompanied by critical-like fluctuations of the macroscopic shear rate. Both macroscopic quantities and fluctuations exhibit power law behaviors in the vicinity of this transition, consistent with previous experimental findings on vibrated granular media. Altogether, our results suggest a generic scenario for the emergence of criticality when shear weakening mechanisms compete with a fluidizing noise., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Epithelial cell monolayers show remarkable displacement and velocity correlations over distances of ten or more cell sizes that are reminiscent of supercooled liquids and active nematics. We show that many observed features can be described within the framework of dense active matter, and argue that persistent uncoordinated cell motility coupled to the collective elastic modes of the cell sheet is sufficient to produce swirl-like correlations. We obtain this result using both continuum active linear elasticity and a normal modes formalism, and validate analytical predictions with numerical simulations of two agent-based cell models, soft elastic particles and the self-propelled Voronoi model together with in-vitro experiments of confluent corneal epithelial cell sheets. Simulations and normal mode analysis perfectly match when tissue-level reorganisation occurs on times longer than the persistence time of cell motility. Our analytical model quantitatively matches measured velocity correlation functions over more than a decade with a single fitting parameter., Comment: updated version accepted for publication in Nat. Comm

We discuss in a statistical physics framework the idea that ``the whole is less than the parts'', as sometimes advocated by sociologists in view of the intrinsic complexity of humans, and try to reconcile this idea with the statistical physicists wisdom according to which ``the whole is more than the sum of its parts'' due to collective phenomena. We consider a simple mean-field model of interacting agents having an intrinsic complexity modeled by a large number of internal configurations. We show by analytically solving the model that interactions between agents lead, in some parameter range, to a `standardization' of agents in the sense that all agents collapse in the same internal state, thereby drastically suppressing their complexity. Slightly generalizing the model, we find that agents standardization may lead to a global order if appropriate interactions are included. Hence, in this simple model, both agents standardization and collective organization may be viewed as two sides of the same coin., Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0710.3256 by other authors

We discuss the notion of nonequilibrium chemical potential in gases of non-interacting active particles filling two compartments separated by a potential energy barrier. Different types of active particles are considered: run-and-tumble particles, active Brownian particles, and active Brownian particles with a stochastic reorientation along an external field. After recalling some analytical results for run-and-rumble particles in one dimension, we focus on the two-dimensional case and obtain a perturbative expression of the density profile in the limit of a fast reorientation dynamics, for the three models of active particles mentioned above. Computing the chemical potentials of the non-equilibrium systems in contact from the knowledge of the stationary probability distribution of the whole system ---which agrees with a recently proposed general definition of the chemical potential in non-equilibrium systems in contact--- we generically find that the chemical potential lacks an equation of state, in the sense that it depends on the detailed shape of the potential energy barrier separating the compartments and not only on bulk properties, at odds with equilibrium. This situation is reminiscent of the properties of the mechanical pressure in active systems. We also argue that the Maxwell relation is no longer valid and cannot be used to infer the nonequilibrium chemical potential from the knowledge of the mechanical pressure., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, submitted to J. Chem. Phys

The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a persistent random walk from which we can extract an effective diffusion coefficient for the large-time dynamics. In our experiments, the complex medium consists in a series of pillars that are designed in a regular lattice using soft lithography microfabrication. The cells are then introduced in the lattice, and their trajectories within the pillars are tracked and analyzed. The effect of the complex medium on the swimming behaviour of microswimmers is analyzed through the measure of relevant statistical observables. In particular, the mean correlation time of direction and the effective diffusion coefficient are shown to decrease when increasing the density of pillars. This provides some bases of understanding for active matter in complex environments.

In this work we focus on fluctuations of time-integrated observables for a particle diffusing in a one-dimensional periodic potential in the weak-noise asymptotics. Our interest goes to rare trajectories presenting an atypical value of the observable, that we study through a biased dynamics in a large-deviation framework. We determine explicitly the effective probability-conserving dynamics which makes rare trajectories of the original dynamics become typical trajectories of the effective one. Our approach makes use of a weak-noise path-integral description in which the action is minimised by the rare trajectories of interest. For `current-type' additive observables, we find the emergence of a propagative trajectory minimising the action for large enough deviations, revealing the existence of a dynamical phase transition at a fluctuating level. In addition, we provide a new method to determine the scaled cumulant generating function of the observable without having to optimise the action. It allows one to show that the weak-noise and the large-time limits commute in this problem. Finally, we show how the biased dynamics can be mapped in practice to an effective driven dynamics, which takes the form of a driven Langevin dynamics in an effective potential. The non-trivial shape of this effective potential is key to understand the link between the dynamical phase transition in the large deviations of current and the standard depinning transition of a particle in a tilted potential.

Many one-dimensional lattice particle models with open boundaries, like the paradigmatic Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (ASEP), have their stationary states represented in the form of a matrix product, with matrices that do not explicitly depend on the lattice site. In contrast, the stationary state of the open one-dimensional Zero-Range Process (ZRP) takes an inhomogeneous factorized form, with site-dependent probability weights. We show that in spite of the absence of correlations, the stationary state of the open ZRP can also be represented in a matrix product form, where the matrices are site-independent, non-commuting and determined from algebraic relations resulting from the master equation. We recover the known distribution of the open ZRP in two different ways: first, using an explicit representation of the matrices and boundary vectors; second, from the sole knowledge of the algebraic relations satisfied by these matrices and vectors. Finally, an interpretation of the relation between the matrix product form and the inhomogeneous factorized form is proposed within the framework of hidden Markov chains., Comment: 11 pages

We study whether the stationary state of two bulk-driven systems slowly exchanging particles can be described by the equality of suitably defined nonequilibrium chemical potentials. Our main result is that in a weak contact limit, chemical potentials can be defined when the dynamics of particle exchange takes a factorized form with respect to the two systems, and satisfies a macroscopic detailed balance property at large deviation level. The chemical potentials of systems in contact generically differ from the nonequilibrium chemical potentials of isolated systems, and do not satisfy an equation of state. Yet, classes of systems satisfying the zeroth law of thermodynamics can be defined in a natural way. These results are illustrated on a driven lattice particle model and on an active particle model. The case when a chemical potential cannot be defined also has interesting consequences, like a non-standard form of the grand-canonical ensemble., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure