Speaker
Description
Active matter describes systems whose constituents can convert energy from their surroundings into directed motion, such as bacteria or colloids with catalytic surfaces. For similar passive systems, the second law and more recent fluctuation theorems relate the irreversibility of their dynamics to the thermodynamic entropy production. Crucially, "irreversibility" is a purely dynamical measure, the log-ratio of the probabilities to observe a given trajectory and its time reverse, while "entropy" is thermodynamically related to the
dissipated heat via Sekimoto's stochastic energetics. We reveal a similar link between the dynamics and thermodynamics for suspensions of interacting active particles at sufficiently low density: The irreversibility is a state function of the thermodynamic system parameters, namely the volume, the temperature, and the so-called active or swim pressure.
