Backing Yourself into a Corner: Self-avoidant Memory Leads to Self-trapping of Swimming Droplets

Microscale swimming droplets have been shown experimentally to respond to local, self-produced chemical gradients that mediate self-avoidance or self-attraction. Via this mechanism, we investigate a physically-inspired stochastic model constructed to encode this observed self-avoidant memory. Surprisingly, we find that the enhanced diffusion is substantially suppressed by the self-avoidant memory relative to that predicted by the commonly used active Brownian model with equivalent velocity and angular decorrelation timescale. We attribute this suppression to transient self-caging that we propose is novel for self-avoidant systems.