Intrinsic time-scales of active forces control the dynamics of soft living matter

Living cells are crowded with active agents which consume energy and perform work on their surrounding environment, constantly keeping the system out of thermodynamic equilibrium. These locally exerted active forces are propagated to larger distances by the cytoskeleton and the cytoplasm. Such activity is believed to play an important role in vital intracellular processes such as transport. The active agents involved in these processes - molecular motors - are characterized by their intrinsic correlation time, typically of the order of seconds. While the significance of these correlation times is not well understood, we argue that they may be tuned to improve the efficiency of particular processes taking place in the cell. We investigate this by analyzing a model comprised of elastic network embedded in a viscous fluid and driven by a collection of stochastic, time-correlated forces. We show how the interplay between the correlation times of the active agents and the relaxation times of the system can lead to qualitatively different behaviors at different length scales.