Shortcut engineering of active matter: run-and-tumble particles

Abstract

Shortcut engineering consists of a class of approaches to rapidly manipulate physical systems by means of specially designed external controls. In this Letter, we apply these approaches to run-and-tumble particles, which are designed to mimic the chemotactic behavior of bacteria and therefore exhibit complex dynamics due to their self-propulsion and random reorientation, making them difficult to control. Following a recent successful application to active Brownian particles, we find a general solution for the rapid control of 1D run-and-tumble particles in a harmonic potential. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using numerical simulations and show that it can lead to a significant speedup compared to simple quenched protocols. Our results extend shortcut engineering to a wider class of active systems and demonstrate that it is a promising tool for controlling the dynamics of active matter, which has implications for a wide range of applications in fields such as materials science and biophysics.