Demixing of active particles in the presence of external fields

Abstract

Active systems are inherently out of equilibrium, as they collect energy from their surroundings and transform it into directed motion. A recent theoretical study suggests that binary mixtures of active particles with distinct effective diffusion coefficients exhibit dynamical demixing above a threshold ratio of the diffusion coefficients. Here, we show that this threshold may be reduced drastically in the presence of external fields. We investigate the demixing as a function of the ratio of the diffusion coefficients and discuss the implications of the results for active systems.