Trapping and sorting of active matter in a periodic potential energy landscape

6^th World Congress on Physics

May 13-14, 2019 | Paris, France

Fabricio Queiroz Potiguar

Universidade Federal do Para, Brasil

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Laser Opt Photonics

Abstract :

We investigate the dynamics of active particles under the influence of a periodic potential landscape through numerical simulations. The particles are soft disks that interact through repulsive linear springs and have the usual rotational noise, but no thermal noise. The function we use to apply the background potential is usually aimed at mimicking an array of optical tweezers, and the resulting background is made of a square lattice of attractive wells. We are mainly interested in understand how the particle move under such background, especially the time they spend inside such wells. Our observations are in accordance with recent work that observes a trapping phenomenon of active rods in a V-shaped trap. We do have states of complete, partial and no trapping of particles within the wells. However, we do observe that low noise particles are less probable to stay within the traps and that the change from a complete trapping to a partial one is continuous. We also investigate two noise cases and how we can sort such mixture of particles