What is active wetting?

Abstract

In recent years the term \textit{active wetting} has gained some traction in works describing, analyzing and modeling a wide variety of wetting phenomena, for instance, in the contexts of biomolecular condensates, of cell layers or cell aggregates, and of active Brownian particles. The present perspective proposes a coarse classification of wetting phenomena including a tentative definition of active wetting. First, different categories of static and dynamic wetting of passive liquids are briefly discussed, in particular, distinguishing equilibrium wetting, relaxational wetting, driven wetting, and reactive wetting. Second, an overview is given of the various phenomena recently described as active wetting. We conclude by discussing a possible definition of active wetting together with a number of caveats one might want to keep in mind when using such classifications.