Universal Poisson statistics of a passive tracer diffusing in dilute active suspensions

Abstract

The statistics of a passive tracer immersed in a suspension of active self-propelled particles (swimmers) is derived from first principles by considering a perturbative expansion of the tracer interaction with the microscopic swimmer field. To first order in the swimmer density, the tracer statistics is exactly represented as a spatial Poisson process combined with independent swimmer-tracer scattering events, rigorously reducing the multi-particle dynamics to two-body interactions. The Poisson representation is valid in any dimensions and for arbitrary interaction forces and swimmer dynamics. It provides in particular an analytical derivation of the coloured Poisson process introduced in [K. Kanazawa et al.; Nature 579, 364 (2020)] highlighting that such a non-Markovian process can be obtained from Markovian dynamics by a variable transformation.