Collective Behavior of Self-propelled Particles in the presence of moving obstacles

Abstract

The concept of self-propelled particles are widely used to various applications of bio nanotechnology, thus by exploiting this strategy they can be further designed as a strategy to enhance target specific drug delivery. Self-propelled particles can show important non equilibrium behaviour, and how they interact with moving obstacles has remained an open problem. In this work we introduce a new model which investigates the collective behaviour of the self-propelled particles in the presence of moving obstacles in heterogeneous medium. Effect of obstacle density, avoidance radius, and noise on the collective motion of the self-propelled particles is investigated. The findings of this study suggested that, with the smaller noise there was cohesion in the system and particles exhibited cluster formation whereas in the case of higher noise particles showed loss of cohesion and there existed no collective motion. Variations in the avoidance radius and obstacle density brought non-monotonic behaviour in the system.