From Inclusions to bulk and boundary disorder in active systems

The talk will demonstrate how the response of active matter to inclusions can be used to uncover its behavior in the presence of bulk and boundary disorder. First, building on results for the influence of an inclusion on dry active systems, it will be shown that bulk disorder generically leads to scale-free correlations in scalar active systems. Second, it will be shown that boundary disorder can disrupt bulk phase transitions. Subsequently, more recent results on the influence of an inclusion on wet active systems will be presented.

The talk is based on:

O. Granek, Y. Kafri, M. Kardar, S. Ro, A. Solon, J. Tailleur, Inclusions, Boundaries and Disorder in Scalar Active Matter, Reviews of Modern Physics, 96, 031003 (2024).

and

T. Arnoulx de Pirey, Y. Kafri, S. Ramaswamy- The Anomalous Long-Ranged Influence of an Inclusion in Momentum-Conserving Active Fluids, Physical Review X, 14, 041034 (2024)